Avner Shanan

Out of Context: Can You Tell I've Been Spending Time on Mastodon?

Reading

I’ve been reading a fair amount of articles lately, so there may be a lot here.

• Some delicious schadenfreude in this Musk takedown from Ed Zitron. (via Jeremy Kahn on Mastodon)
• Boeing has been in the news a lot lately for minor issues like “parts falling off mid-flight”. No big deal. This article gives you a sense of how the company got there (hint: regulatory capture + ignoring/sidelineing engineers and inspectors is not a good combination). (via Erin Kissane on Mastodon)
• I sometimes find myself at odds with my peers when the subject of the Agile methodology comes up. I would say that I’m a disillusioned fan of Agile – I think there are good practice and lessons we can take from it, but that it’s applied both poorly and in places where it makes little sense. I’m often wary of critiques of Agile, as they often seem to toss baby and bathwater both. This article from Dorian Taylor takes a much more nuanced stance than your standard “Agile bad” takedown. It addresses (or identifies, at least) one of the main shortcomings of the methodology: the fact that Agile has very little to say about the decision making that takes place beyond the team. There is nothing a sprint retro or scrum master can do if the C-suite isn’t listening, a topic on which Agile is deafenlingly silent.
  • I also really liked the section on conceptual integrity:

    The one idea from the 1970s most conspicuously absent from Agile discourse is conceptual integrity. This—​another contribution from Brooks—​is roughly the state of having a unified mental model of both the project and the user, shared among all members of the team. Conceptual integrity makes the product both easier to develop and easier to use, because this integrity is communicated to both the development team and the user, through the product.
    
    Without conceptual integrity, Brooks said, “there will be as many mental models as there are people on the team.” This state of affairs requires somebody to have the final say on strategic decisions. It furthermore requires this person to have diverse enough expertise to mentally circumscribe—​and thus have a vision for—​the entire project in every way that was important, even if not precisely down to the last line of code.

  • I’ve spent the last few years of my career primarily focused on internal tooling and conceptual integrity is very conspicuously missing in many of the conversations around this kind of operational work. I’ve struggled to communicate this to Product Managers before, so I’m happy to now have handy quotes to share
  • If you do click through to the article, don’t sleep on the clickable parentheticals (a feature I recently learned is called StretchText).
• This Mastodon post about “(ab)user stories” as a way to frame negative use cases and improve thinking around user safety.
• An interesting article about taking your developer community seriously (via Mastodon)
• This thread about the “eerie” nature of LLMs.