Perhaps Metrics After All

In physics the observer effect stipulates that an observed system is disturbed by the act of observation. As someone that spent a considerable part of my adult life in corporate work life I can confirm that this effect is very real also in corporations.

The Developer as a Resource

I work in the IT industry and in my opinion this industry is less efficient than it could be. In this text I want to look at one of the reasons why I think that is, namely a pull in the industry towards seeing workers as resources rather than people.

Thoughts on Lean and IT

To my distress after leaving school I have time and again been faced with the fact that although school rewards you with praise and good notes when you manage to regurgitate given sets of truths, the real world seldom hands you precise definitions or clear cut choices. Instead we see terms appearing that get re-interpreted over and over again and finally you reach polarization. Not because necessarily people disagree on the core ideas, but because people no longer agree on what core ideas actually underlie a specific term.

Healthy Process

I’ve been thinking about what signifies a healthy project. A pattern that I have seen in many places is that a lot of tasks are created and estimated, but most of them never get done. Some of them get the rare attention of recurring meetings that all end with the acknowledgement that we should talk about this later.

Kill Your Darlings

This might be just me, but I feel like it as it has become easier and easier to create software, the quality of software has become worse and worse. I think it ties into the tip “Kill Your Darlings” that is given to start ups.

DB Triggers

I’ve been doing IT for more than 15 years. There are some tools that I’ve always heard of but never really found worth the effort to investigate as they have never fully seemed like good practice. Still, the more tools you have available the more flexible you are to adress diverse problems. So that’s why I’ll start doing some investigations to just explore what’s possible if you use some of the deeper features around.

Agency and Perception

I really enjoy hearing the perspectives of others. Especially when it comes to topics that I’m familiar enough with to feel I have a deeper understanding. It’s exciting to meet another perspective that changes yours or another perspective that you disagree with but it still makes you think.

Water Under the Bridge

A long time ago angularjs was seeing widespread adoption. The early adopters appeared like magicians and the number of libraries and frameworks in the javascript space exploded!

Value

When we go to work we want to create value. As a developer it’s easy to get the feeling that the code we create is the value. After all, the more intelligent the developer, the quicker one can push out functional and well performing code.

Tech is Downstream From Culture

Have you ever worked with a code base that has room for improvement? I have, I’d say consistently throughout my career, been in that situation. There is always room for improvement. In all the organizations I’ve been in there has also naturally been long discussion regarding what can be done to mitigate these found problems. These solutions tend to always be technical in nature, and just recently it occurred to me that I think that whole discussion is missing the point.