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: ‘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. ‘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’. 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. ...

Let’s imagine you’re a Program/Product Manager, SDM, or Lead Engineer/Architect. You’re starting a program to develop tech thingie ‘X’. You’ve read all the books. You’ve looked into Agile, from the brevity of the Agile Manifesto, to the what-are-you-selling nonsense that is the Scaled Agile Framework. In all that, you come to the same decision that people have had since Amenhotep designed the first pyramid: How do you organize yourself? That is, how do you set-up your group of people to accomplish the task? ...

Just now, I had a lovely conversation with a gentleman who’d come to Amazon in 2005. He was working for another (very large) tech firm at the time and he saw that Amazon had the same revenue as CorpX but had 1/3rd the number of employees. He made it through the interview process and they said, “Very glad to have you; now we just need to figure out what you’re going to do.” ...

It’s been quite a year. The previous twelve years I’ve written this blog, I’ve been based out of Georgetown, Kentucky, and I worked at Lexmark. I’ve added many things in that time: A wife, a step-son, two daughters, and 2 houses. Through it all, I remained in Georgetown and worked at Lexmark. As I write this, both have changed. Set your wayback machine for Jan 1, 2016 and let’s see how I got here. ...

As I type this, it’s 8:44 am, and I just drove 30 minutes in 10 miles of pouring rain to start the week on 4 hours of sleep. I went to bed about 11:30, but didn’t fall asleep until nearly 1am—very unusual for me. Like an overtightened bolt, I felt my corners round-off just a bit yesterday, the torque warping my mind just too much to sleep. There’s much to consider, globally, nationally, and within my own hearth. Much I can do little about. Globally, there keeps being more of us, and our impact on the planet worsens by the year. Humans certainly seem less education, humane, and trustworthy than we did even 10 years ago. Perhaps my eyes are just open to our own debauchery, my naiveté burned away like so much slag from God’s refiner’s fire. ...

Some things are too long for a tweet, to short for a short-form essay. I like to think of them like “macro-tweets.” Some have taken to posting paragraphs or even whole positions on twitter in the form of: 1/7 2/7 And so on. That’s an abuse of the platform. Longer-form should be somewhere else. End preamble. * * * So Maria and I have abandoned swimming for the moment. I don’t know why exactly, aside from we don’t have an indoor pool membership and the outdoor pool we have is rather….variable…with regard to temperature. I went to swim about 400m with an air temp of 48 degrees back in September, and part of my body just went: “You’re nucking futs, dude.” ...

Last Tuesday night was surreal. The data all indicated that DJT had no chance in hell of becoming president. He never polled above 42%. Then…the returns rolled in. The NBC anchor team already had their through-line prepped: “Did he lose the election on day one, calling immigrants rapists?” “If he loses Florida or North Carolina, he’s going to have a long night.” As the hours wore on, it became clear that we were at the very end of the bell curve, amid Nate Silver’s 15% chance that DJT could win. I became more and more despondent, realizing that of the two bad choices, the Chaotic Evil was going to be the electoral victor. ...

Whatever happens over the next few days, I’d like us to remember we’re Americans. We’ve surmounted Monarchy, the burning of the capital, a war between ourselves, mountain ranges, slavery, polio, Fascism, Communism, presidential assassination, Watergate, 9/11, pet rocks, and several sub-par Metallica albums. People tried to take our freedom. “Over our dead bodies!” we cry. And so it was. We will gladly give it away, though, in fear and hate, vilifying our neighbors. ...

Postulate: No matter the brilliance of a given development team, it’s always more efficient to Analyze/Groom/Think about requirements before you’re in the meeting where you commit to delivering those requirements. I’ve been developing software with groups of fairly brilliant people for some time. The above is my genuine experience. Corollary: When a group of people encounter a set of requirements and expect to scope and commit to them in realtime while reading the document, it wastes everyone’s time. ...

Too long for a tweet. Too short for a blog post. These are some tech-related skills I’m glad I have. They come in awfully handy: Touch typing. You’d be surprised at the number of people who work with computers for a living who can’t actually touch type. Markdown. Markdown is incredibly handy for tossing-off documentation and forum responses. I’ve actually considered hosing this blog entirely and converting to posts hosted on Github, formatted in Markdown. ...

A few quick thoughts on a subject I’ve seen at least 10 times in my career: “Okay, when are you done enough for me to test this thing?” Let’s parse that a bit, because the ensuing arguments are one of definition “Okay,” Acknowledging that stuff is just great or else I wouldn’t be talking. “when” I’m going to ask you for a date. “are you done” Done as is: Things won’t change between the time I hit submit on the bug and I go to the bug review meeting and look like an imbecile. “enough” I’m not a total douche. I’d like to test this, not make you look like a fool by filing 15,000 bugs. “for me” Hi, I’m a professional software tester. Yes, we do exist. “to test” I was born to test and break things. I can make your code cry. You need me. “this thing?” At the end of the day, your work of art is a piece of business value and I’ll not insult both of us by implying otherwise. The above is the way a real QA professional sees that question. I think. Because, I’m not a QA professional, and God HELP YOU if I were. I maintain my decade-plus assertion that great testers are born, not made. ...

I’m homesick. “Home” is hard to define: The place where your feet are. The place where your wife and kids are. The place where you feel at…well….home. I don’t feel at home in Austin. All the social and physical trappings of having roots here just aren’t here yet: We don’t have a real house. We have an apartment with a yard. It’s nice enough, but nothing about it feels like ‘home’ except for the occupants. We don’t have a church. Realistically, we’re not even close. Everywhere we’ve visited, coming up on 10 churches at this point has been some combination of too. Too loud. Too small. Too doctrinally unsound. Protestantism, as ever, remains a mixed bag once you go somewhere else. The water here is genuinely terrible. For one thing, tap water is hot, not cool or cold. There seems to be mix of limestone and sulfur in that’s just hard to take. Everything reasonably potable is filtered or bottled. I don’t have the friends and colleagues I left behind. I knew this was part of the deal. I felt called to come to Texas, but I guess I didn’t appreciate having people who really knew me. There are positives, of course. My wife and daughters seem to be flourishing, amid the many homeschool groups and activities of Greater Austin (Cedar Park and Round Rock, in particular). We’re able to save for the first time in our life,. Work couldn’t be more stimulating. ...

So, during my job-hunt, I spent at least an hour a day on HackerRank. I highly recommend the site for anyone learning to code, sharpening their skills, or learning a new language. Anyway, so at my new job we use Java8 extensively. I’d had cursory exposure to Java at my last gig, but mostly in the “Why won’t this frigging library run with my Java 1.7 JVM?!” variety. So, it was time to learn something new. Narturally, I thought of HackerRank and it’s Java tutorials. ...

Yes.