"Until I started using Specification Workshops as the name for a collaborative meeting about acceptance tests, it was very hard to convince business users to participate. But a simple change in naming made the problem go away."

"What is it that mathematicians accomplish?"

"An Informative Build is a build that tells us what the state of our development is so that we can make an informed decision. We need an informative build, because otherwise Continuous Integration is just a waste of our time.

That’s right, I said Continuous Integration is a waste of time. It is a waste of time, because simply running a build doesn’t help us unless that build can also tell us what we need to do. An Informative Build:

Fails when something is wrong, letting us know that our system is broken and we must fix it.
When it fails it tells us precisely why it failed so that we know what we have to do to fix it.
When nothing is wrong it doesn’t fail. We shouldn’t be wasting cycles chasing down errors due to brittle tests or external dependencies."

"And so as the acting class is going on I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I loved movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies."

"Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t delegate real responsibility and authority to their people. It is your product people who are too busy to explain what really needs to be done. It is your facilities people who can’t make a workspace fit to work in. It is your programmers who won’t learn the techniques necessary to succeed. It is your managers and product owners who keep increasing pressure until any focus on quality is driven out of the project."

"What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important."

"With these people, there is nothing more offensive than the fork. You are going to split the community, take away committers. It is heresy. It is a schism.

The nature of open source on the SourceForge model is academia at it’s most petty, because the stakes could not be lower. It is not about the source code, it is about the source code repository and control to access thereof.

GitHub puts an end to this nonsense. I can develop my software and I can use GitHub to publish my software. I don’t have to work within an arbitrary community, but grow support for my software through my own social and professional network."