I say this after 19 years making software:  There’s always a date.  Get over it.

I’ve lived through the Agile Revolution, and various schemes to sell consulting named: Spiral, Rational Unified Process, eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and the Scaled Agile Framework.

Through it all, there’s always some sort of date.  Words like:

• Milestone
• Need by date
• Deadline
• Start of Production
• Promise Date
• Customer Promise
• Statement of Work

Honestly, if they’re not there, you should probably be worried.  Projects of significance require planning and planning requires dates.  If you haven’t seen a date in quite sometime, you might want to join the rest of us getting paid oodles of money to ship features to customers who’ll pay us.

In sum, here’s my problem:  I’ve joined a Baptist Church, but I’m no Baptist.

In detail it goes like this:

• Baptists come from the Calvinist tradition.  

• You may have heard of “free will baptists.”  These are not those.

• Calvinism is a very well reasoned Protestant doctrine based on Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.  It further comes from the sole scrirptura tradition of the Reformation, in that it solely derives from points in the canonical scriptures, especially the New Testament.

Things seem….bad.

Offhand, enumerating the things that seem broken in my country right now:

• Our government isn’t really functioning.  The Constitutional Republican Democracy of 1787 seems like a failure at scale.
• We’re more tribal than we’ve been since segregation, a process that’s accelerating.
• We’re in unending, global guerrilla war against people willing to kill themselves for an idea incompatible with our existence as a nation.
• We have roughly one mass shooting per day.  Yesterday, there was one in Kentucky.
• We’ve lost our ability as a society to dream of something bigger: The moon, world peace, whatever.  That seems like a 1960’s fever dream at this point.

What can I do about any of the above?  

So, 2017 is past.

As luck would have it, we decided today would be a good day for midwinter cleaning, as I’m halfway through my 2 week stint off work.  I dug through a box I had from our move back in June, and within was my first Employee Evaluation from Amazon.  I got to look at what I thought would be my 2017 and got to compare it to what I actually accomplished.

After a brief spate of car fever, I did some research on (say) a Chevy Cruze Diesel or a Chevy Volt.  What with the recent flooding in Houston, I convinced myself that buying used might be a bad idea, so I decided to check out incentives and options out there.

The short version: Math doesn’t lie.

Let’s say you finance a $30,000 at 0% interest for 5 years.  That’s 60 months, so the math’s rather obvious: $30,000 / 60 == $500 / month.

My friend Dannah (Russell) Jones died this past Friday morning, after collapsing following exercise the night before.  She was thirty-eight years old.

I met Dannah when we were freshmen at Georgetown College in 1997.  She was a self-proclaimed “military brat” lately of Dayton, Ohio.  She had a spark of life, humor, and intelligence.  She made some friends, but she wasn’t a “joiner.”  If Dannah didn’t like you, you’d know about it.

Much as it takes a symphony in multiple movements to fully exercise an orchestra, Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver fully exercises film as a systemic input to your brainstem. I left exhausted, happy, and eager to see it again.

Act I, Take Me Away!

Act 1 is Wright’s original concept writ large: “Baby” is a getaway driver, and we see a contender for the best getaway scene in film set perfectly to a soundtrack. This is the overture, the who, what, and where. There’s almost no dialog–just searing “wow….Wow….WOW!!!!!”

I’ve just been having a rough time lately.

I’m like an overstuffed Tupperware and me trying to close the lid and put one foot in front of the other isn’t working so well in the past few days.

This is me attempting to talk that out, to myself.

To begin: My sixteen-year-old stepson chose not to live with us, and the Kentucky judiciary has supported that decision.  Months of preparation and legal wrangling resulted to a seven minute conversation in chambers.  That was a month ago, June 8th, and the reality of it settles upon me a little more each day.  It’s all just sadness and anger, and it comes out at inconvenient times for no apparent reason.

I haven’t bought a car for myself since 2008, at which time I bought an eighteen year old car I never should have sold.

In the intervening ten years, I’ve had two cars, both welcome hand-me-downs from my wife:  The Camry-of-Doom and Sparky, my current 2010 Ford Fusion.

Having moved to Austin, paid-off my wife’s Sienna minivan, and begun to sock-away some funds for a new ride, it seems time to consider what’s next.

I kid you not, this is like the Winston Churchill “never give up” speech for me.

Wow.

“You’ve lost the bite in the bit!” my dad yelled.

“Huh?”

I was about nine and we were installing a swinging gate on our farm, drilling two holes in this gigantic post my father sunk into the ground in front of our tobacco barn.   I was excited to be helping him, since I was a general doughy screw-up (his pre-conversion past time was calling me ‘Lardy’).

Anyway, I’d been using the brace and bit apparatus because we were probably 100 yards from the nearest electrical outlet.  It was a neat hand tool: You basically put the drill bit where you wanted a hole, put your shoulder to the knob at the back, then turned it until you bored the hole desired….

So, after the dirge that was series nine–Clara’s gone, yay!–we waited.

We waited since DECEMBER 25, 2015.  We noticed there’d be a new companion and she’d be “cool and different”.  We heard Moffat was leaving.  We noted Capaldi was bowing-out.  None of these were good signs.

This sounded much like Poochie had come to the Whoniverse

Thus far, it would seem that’s entirely wrong. 

Bill’s a (slightly unintelligible) delight, and Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor is now….well….spry.  Wiping his memory clean of dour Clara seems like it made him whole again, like he’s once again the madman in the box, with all of Time and Space.

I’ll never forget M.

M was my mentor, and we didn’t always get along.  I chose him as a mentor because we didn’t get along.  I needed someone who had different perspectives than I did.

Anyway, one of our early meetings, I talked about people at work I admired.  I expressed that I admired a guy we’ll call Brad.

Brad was a guy I’d worked with many times.  He was part of senior leadership, and he still found time to write code, on the evenings and weekends if necessary.  At the time, his architecture team was embroiled in doing the scut work of rolling-out “Agile Development” to a hardware-development organization.  (Another really long post for another day….)

Herein, I shall commit heresy.

I’m going to suggest that “Software Strategy” is useless:  Enabling success involves the very large, and the very small, leaving “Strategy” in the useless middle.

Who am I to say this?  I’ve been in software for 18 years, and I’ve been in a leadership role for the last 8.  I’ve spent innumerable hours in “Strategy” meetings.  I’ve had just about enough of that and I’d like to suggest a better way.

Here’s a shot at some frequently asked questions:

1.  ‘Harvid’?? My name seems hard for most humans to say.  One day, my academic team coach in college conflated the terms ‘Harold’ and ‘Harvard’ and what came out was ‘Harvid’.  Thus a nickname was born.
2. ‘miniharryc’? The year was 2003 and as a member of Blogger, I had early access to this newfangled webmail thing called GMail.  I needed to come-up with an email address, and I was tired of my perennial shortname ‘hcombs’ or ‘hcombs0’.   At the time I drove a MINI (2003 R50 5-speed British Racing Green w/white top), so I prepended those 4 letters to the front of an easier way to say my name.  Thus, ‘mini-harry-c’.
3. How did you get into programming?  I was never a programmer in High School.  I’ve always been a computer geek since DOS 2.11 and an Tandy 1000 EX, but was never particularly into programming.  I took a ‘CSC 111’ class in the Spring of 1998.  I took the next class (the weed-out linked-lists and trees class) the next semester, and I attended an ACM programming competition that fall with very little practical experience.  One of my teammates offered me an internship at Lexmark, which I began in March 1999.  I would stay there for the next 17 years.

I’ll edit this to add more as it occurs to me.  These are the general questions that come up most often.

Why is it so hard to keep perspective?

No, Ansel Adams, I’m not talking about the physical perspective you have on a landscape, but rather the dispassionate distance from a situation needed to keep you from punching the clerk at the Kwik-E-Mart when he screws up giving you change.

I certainly know what losing perspective looks like:

• You’re afraid, alot.
• Your lower-brain puts you in fight-or-flight mode at any point.
• You increasingly focus on yourself to the exclusion of the greater good, morality, or simple humanity.
• You say things you don’t mean.
• You do things you don’t really mean, either.

One thing I’ve noticed is folks in tech lose perspective faster than most.  I have some ideas on why that is.

I’ll never forget taking Tyler on a tour of our new offices in Building 001 at Lexmark HQ.

Back in the day, 001 had been a manufacturing line that made the iconic IBM Selectric Typewriter and the Model M buckling-spring mechanical keyboard.  People still like those things today.   Suffice it to say, it was a quarter-mile long building with a floor flat as a pancake, and roughly 35 yards wide.

For a good decade after I hired-on, most of that building sat empty, home to a disused loading dock and stacks of IBM standard issue desks and chairs.  In 2012, our control-freak CFO decided we needed to do some “space consolidation” so he spent millions of dollars outfitting that area as a massive cubicle farm and moved us from our private offices and labs into that farm.

So, April 1st will mark a year since Lexmark paid me to find a new job.

To recap, I agreed for that year, I’d not besmirch the name of LXK, recruit anyone of my old colleagues, or attempt to work there again.  The last is really not an issue, but the former two are tougher.  I’d dearly love to reach out to folks and get them to work with me again.

Let’s get this out of the way: Social media killed the blog.  Before 2007, there was a cacophony of individual ‘Blogs where people shouted their unvarnished opinions into the aether.  Some had quite a following, especially in tech.

The concept was strikingly simple:  Use a blog engine (like this one, Blogger) or bootstrap your own site on Wordpress and make your content accessible to anyone with an internet connection.  This was the internet at its purest:  Content and hyperlinks all “webbed” together, with idea building upon another free-flowing idea.

I heard a sermon yesterday about “Authenticity.”   The general theme was: “Isn’t it exhausting wearing a mask all the time.  Stop caring about what people think and expect and just be yourself.”

Wow, I wish it were just that simple.

First, we must deal with “The Puck Factor”.  This guy:

Bascially “Puck” was a universally-reviled character from the MTV Reality show “Real World” in the 1990’s.  To sum-up He was unapologetic in his self-centered asshattery.  Looking at Puck and saying, “Just be yourself,” was like an exercise in an Ethics class.  Puck liked hurting other people.  That was genuinely him being him.