• I drafted some notes last week, but didn’t press publish, so these notes are two weeks’ worth.
• A client colleague prompted me to make more use of Copilot in Teams. It’s hugely useful, but there’s a gap between reading and writing in all these tools – it’s too easy to copy and paste the application summary rather than edit it (particularly if you have another meeting to get to, since the context disappears when you move away). It’s going to be interesting to see how helpful this proves in the long run.
• I wonder if remote working is increasing the number of meetings as it is so easy to book them – and cameras off means that there are people multi-tasking, rather than looking bored in the room. There’s no feedback to prompt people to push back against the calls.
• I’ve been playing with AmazonQ. The UX is an atrocity, but the tool itself impressive and compelling. There are however, a lot of subtleties about how this would work as a development workflow, and how it will scale up to use in large organisations. I’m using the Nilenso piece on AI-coding as a guideline. I made a post about my initial response to Q and another one about my second week.

Links

• I’ve been catching up on Sean Goedecke’s excellent writing. In Do Not Yell at the Language Model he talks about how berating a language model for mistakes might create a negative context, producing worse results.
• Peter Hilton describes an amazing lightning talk, where Chris Oldwood told programming jokes for 5 minutes. Hilton goes on to imagine a book of 97 Jokes Every Programmer Should Know, suggesting that such jokes are a good way to learn some aspects of programming. “There are 10 kinds of programmers: those who understand binary, those who don’t, and those who weren’t expecting a base 3 joke.”
• Charity Majors wrote an interesting piece, On How Long it Takes to Know if a Job is Right for You or Not, in which she talks about the need for alignment between a manager’s values and the company they work for.
• The striking thing about Bo Frese’s The 13 Ways We Kill High-Performing Agile Teams was how often these occur, despite going against well-known best practise. Also interesting to see that the scrum guide had removed ‘the three questions’ as a stand-up practise.
• Good retros are hard, and Who Needs Action Items by Daniel Cooper is a good piece on this. “Eventually, people stop bringing anything that actually matters and it’ll all be fluff. No one wants to accidentally become the owner of ‘improve emotional tone in retros (Q3 OKR)’.”

Books

I completed a re-read of Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained, which I last read back around 2001. I have a lot of notes to reflect on, but the biggest surprise was how little empirical evidence Beck had for his theories. Which is not to say I think Beck is wrong per se, rather that his insights are based on a particular set of experiences. There was also some provocative thoughts about documentation which goes against what I think, and is worth interrogating.