"As I realize that open source is going to define my professional life (and likely my personal one as well), my tolerance for assholes gets smaller and smaller. Unlike Rusty, I won’t simply stand by and allow these people to run amok. I will call out antisocial behavior, enforce professionalism in the communities where I have the power to do, and leave the communities that cannot at least offer civility."

Compare/contrast this with yesterday's valve/abash link...

oh Hugo Gernsback, what DIDN'T you do?

great metaphor to show just how many assumptions are baked into such a seemingly simple task as "hang this picture"

"In many aspects, the situation above resembles the good traits of an engineer whom an organization loves to employ. It is therefore in the best of interests of all involved parties to cultivate and promote the passion. The restaurant owner should not worry that the chef’s innovative crème brûlée becomes a masterpiece which steals the spotlight, as the chef most likely does not plan to open his own cafe anytime soon. Meanwhile, hours and hours spent in the kitchen, personal or not, would indirectly benefit whoever employs him, present and future."

'One of the leading causes of sky falling situations is distributed ownership, and as a strategy distributed ownership seems very humane. We’re going to put the right people on the right problems....A sky falling situation exists not because of a single failure on one team. It’s a collection of multiple large and small mistakes on many teams that snowballs into an unexpected worse case scenario. Teams of people succeed and fail at scale. A likely major contribution to your current disaster is the fact that multiple well meaning and fully informed people looked at an emergent disaster and thought, “Well, someone who is not me is going to handle this, right?”'

understanding this and following its immediate web could probably suck up a month or two of serious time: "Conklin identifies the following as defining characteristics of wicked problems: 1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution. 2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. 3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong. 4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique. 5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.' 6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions."

slides from the presentation I noted here: http://www.cwinters.com/blog/2012/01/06/pittsburgh_ruby_software_process.html

"So then -- if we're lucky -- somebody does up a spreadsheet. Then everybody has to update the spreadsheet. Notice how the focus has moved. Instead of sitting in a room doing other things while the status of our project beckons us on the wall, we're sitting in our cubicles filling out a spreadsheet once a day. The focus is on remembering to update a tool, not thinking about the status of our project. The tool starts running the project. It becomes the central source for finding out things. Not the people."

story/task/test manager a la JIRA, but with some really slick interface features; also github integration

"Building a team where everyone is capable of managing their own time is tricky. Getting to the point where managers trust their team enough not to grimace and go asking for updates every time a game of pool starts is very difficult. And you can’t order it online. Unless you have the right culture you’ll just end up with a pool table covered in dust, and copies of EA games from 2007. How’s that for a morale boost?"

I love his point around minutes in about taking control of the whiteboard. Completely true.

"And this is the essential broader point--as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria."

"Software has become like body language in the way it reveals your inner personality to a patient observer. Your body language always tells the truth, even when you are trying to hide an ugly secret, and it will give you away every time. You simply can’t create likable software if you are a dysfunctional company."

nice list, both technical and social

"The first couple of go rounds, there was dead silence. No questions—just head nodding and a couple of blank stares. After some probing, we realized that people needed to feel comfortable speaking up, that it didn’t just come naturally. We brainstormed a bunch of different ways to get over this hurdle and here were some experiments that ultimately worked...I thought we would surface creative answers faster. When everyone had a clear understanding of the hard problems, their collective brains were on the table for parallel processing. The best information rarely sat with the senior executives but with the employees that were closest to the product and closest to the customers. And the best answers would often come from the most unlikely of places."

Bruce Eckel's notes -- short and sweet

"People would be horrified if their quarterly investment report was only a phone call from their broker’s assistant saying ‘everything is fine, let’s check in three months’ (no report, no on-line viewing, no quarterly calls), but are quite content to receive a call from their doctor’s secretary saying ‘the results of your blood work are fine’, and leave it at that."

(aka 'Senior cohousing communities') "Since residents live within shouting distance of one another, in what is sometimes called an intentional community, they have come to share their lives in many ways. One group swims in nearby Holston Lake once a week; another has a Friday night Netflix ritual. The community establishes “clearing house” sessions to resolve disputes, and nominates “care coordinators” to check on residents’ health.

Atul Gawande commencement address at Harvard Medical School: "These values are the opposite of autonomy, independency, self-sufficiency. Many doctors fear the future will end daring, creativity, and the joys of thinking that medicine has had. But nothing says teams cannot be daring or creative or that your work with others will not require hard thinking and wise judgment. Success under conditions of complexity still demands these qualities. Resistance also surfaces because medicine is not structured for group work. Even just asking clinicians to make time to sit together and agree on plans for complex patients feels like an imposition. "

charities bring problems, volunteers try to solve them with software over a weekend

whether this is accurate I don't know, but it's a great look at relationships between a language, the people who adopt it, and the social structures that result: "So why don't the Lisp hackers put the Smalltalk guys in their proper place? Why don't they make a free development system that calls to mind some of the lost glories of the LispM, even if they can't reproduce another LispM?...The reason why this doesn't happen is because of the Lisp Curse. Large numbers of Lisp hackers would have to cooperate with each other. Look more closely: Large numbers of the kind of people who become Lisp hackers would have to cooperate with each other. And they would have to cooperate with each other on a design which was not already a given from the beginning."

"The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. "

"I know you’ve done this before: you’ve had five other jobs and you have well refined people assessment instincts. Except, well, they’re biased. These instincts are based on where you’ve been and you have never been here before. My suggestion is that the less you trust your instincts, the more you’ll learn about your new job and that’s why I wrote you a ninety days list..."

'I'm into the change, I love it. I love the fact that the record companies are all going down. This is a personal triumph for me. I beat the record companies. Sony Music may go out of business, but I'm not going out of business. And Tower Records, I walked down the street six months ago and saw the boards on the walls, and I went, "I'm still here, and they're gone."'

'Facilitation comes from the latin _facile_, which mean _easy_. In fact, the role of a facilitator in a group setting is to "make things easy". It involves planning, organizing, and setting or supporting rules and goals within such groups. It is my goal here to collect and share many of the tricks, techniques and practices that facilitators use in their work...Facilitation Patterns are then general reusable solutions to common facilitation problems.'

interesting ideas and I agree with a lot of it; but like a lot of stuff out of 37signals I feel it's heavily biased toward people like them; this is not a bad thing, but I'm not sure their experiences can be extrapolated to the business world at large

"Everyone deals with the resistance differently, which is why groups of people will slaughter a great idea, each protecting themselves from the lizard brain in their own way. The resistance loves the status quo, because the status quo is safe, it's here, it's now, it's known, and it won't hurt us, not as much as the unknown future might hurt us."

"Gerrit is a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system....Gerrit makes reviews easier by showing changes in a side-by-side display, and allowing inline comments to be added by any reviewer....Gerrit simplifies Git based project maintainership by permitting any authorized user to submit changes to the master Git repository, rather than requiring all approved changes to be merged in by hand by the project maintainer. This functionality enables a more centralized usage of Git."

first of three parts on their relationship of creative tension

"The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things."

could it finally be? something that will replace visio?

from founder of Twisted on forking (at the featureset level) and what's lost when that happens

1. The longstanding facts; 2. How journalists know what they know; 3. What's not known

new (?) term for long-standing practices; like 'agile' it can be retrofitted onto a lot

"A valet for your URLs. Push puts the page you're looking at on to your stack. Pop brings up the last page pushed. Your list is shared between all of your browsers! ... We made it so we could send pages to our phones and vice versa, for example an article to your phone to read on the train or a page from your phone to your laptop to view on a bigger screen. Push on the laptop, Pop on the PS3."

nice story from woman who was pen pal w/ John Hughes in late 90s

allow operations, sales, etc. to focus their interruptions^Hquestions on a single person per team

"Mayo doctors are also shielded from the incentives that discourage evidence-based medicine, because they all receive fixed salaries. They don't make more if they do more to patients, and they don't make less if they take more time to talk to them — even if they use the time to explain why a CT scan or a wonder drug advertised on TV might not be advisable. They don't have to worry about reimbursements that overvalue radiological tests and invasive prostate treatments, undervalue preventive care and watchful waiting and put zero value on returning a phone call or thinking about a case."

lots of great stuff here: "First, the positive deviants have found ways to resist the tendency built into every financial incentive in our system to see patients as a revenue stream. These are not the doctors who instruct their secretary to have patients calling with follow-up questions schedule an office visit because insurers don’t pay for phone calls. These are not the doctors who direct patients to their side-business doing Botox injections for cash or to the imaging center that they own. They do not focus, the way business people do, on maximizing their high-margin work and minimizing their low-margin work"

includes widgets for tracking (desktop and in-browser; not sure about android...)

on interviews, finding the right people, cutting short diminishing return meetings, and the importance of failing

story planning, velocity tracking, manipulating stories in iteration

"An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply."

full text of 1968 Datamation article with Conway's law

interesting comparison of healthcare + IT to an auto plant (sick people go on one end of the assembly line, well people come out the other end) and the web (a space for systems to emerge); also, the first time I've heard the phrase "Disease Industrial Complex"

discussion on guts of running an online community

like subethaedit but on the web; allows 'playback' of a document so you can trace its origins

find a good niche, participate: good advice

"I heard once that in Great Britain's MOD if you design software for a plane you go up in the test plane when the software is beta-tested. If all programmers were held with that level of accountability, how many do you think would still be in our field? How many would you want to collaborate with before you went up in the plane together?"

testing the iphone as someone who used to use windows mobile devices, pretty gushing; I like the idea of a corporate itunes

"When you work with great people, you have trust -- which makes everything truly simple. Great people have a choice as to where and to whom they wish to invest their most precious resource of trust. "

nice article; I'd bet the shared context assumed by this is one of the things that makes long-running teams so productive; but so many ways to learn programming make this tougher

"We aim to become the premier Pittsburgh-area hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. Come to the DevHouse to have fun and get things done!"

ugh -- it's a wonder anything ever gets done

good overview

everything about you hosted in one place, syndicated, permissioned... I want that!

what s3 means to small companies, innovation infrastructure, etc

Sam Ruby on why blogs are useful (one of the few times I'll link to a blog about blogging, promise)

cool: treat your wiki as a remote filesystem; next step: offline use + sync (the 'V' in WebDAV does stand for 'Versioning')

enable AJAX applications to work offline, using an OS-specific component; could be HUGE

mail (POP/SMTP/IMAP) and calendar server, built on jboss and opensource; let's hope Andy's Redhat money lasts a while!

I still think this is a great space for differentiating wikis and other collaboration tools

now free!

"Things only get worse when a team is charged with actually making a decision. One of the biggest problems is that it's easy for a few members of a group who think the same way--but who may be flat-out wrong--to sway the opinions of others."

great post about where OS/platform vendors draw inspiration, and what they may owe to their sources (if they even *are* sources, since nothing's new under the sun)

'"We need a process to ensure that the client does not get half-finished design sketches" is code for "Greg fucked up."'

groupware server platform, lots of AJAXy goodness...

cross-platform collaborative text editor

just need to hook this up to "people I like" and we're rolling...