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.

September is ruined, it seems.

September is my time of reflection, just as it was 2 years ago.  I looked out upon Chevy Chase in Lexington, on bi-monthly afternoon off, and I was both over-caffeinated and sad.

Today isn’t all that different:  I’m pensive, alone among a crowd, and over-caffeinated.  I’m a Christian without a church home, a football fan without a team, and a father down one child.

Joey fired us.

Tomorrow marks two weeks since that was official.

I love my son.
I miss my son.

Maybe this was all a mistake.

I have no idea.

Perhaps that’s the beginning of Faith.

If so, faith is painful as Hell.

And lonely.

So fine, and sunny, and smiling, and empty.

It’s said that God breaks us, so he might rebuild us.
I’m a thousand pieces flying in close formation.

“Hey, this traffic isn’t so bad!” I thought a month ago.  It was July and I was averaging 15-20 minutes to work down a 6 lane surface street with an effective 70mph speed limit (Yay, Texas?)

…then school started back.

That same street became one backup after another this morning, and it took me 30 minutes door-to-door, even though I live 9 miles away.   Between schools being back in session and UT classes restarting, something like 40,000 more Austinites are on the road each morning and afternoon.

I’ve been reflecting lately.  Huge life changes will do that to you.  You know, things like: Quitting your job of 17 years without another one handy, moving to a state you’ve only driven through once, working at one of the big 4 tech firms, and being fired as a Dad by my own son.

So, when do you decide to make a change?

Looking back on it, there were several discrete moments where I was ‘out’.

Just wanted to pause and write about that super-exciting topic: Code reviews.

Let’s begin with defining what code review is, and establishing the case for making it part of your development process.  We’ll also take a trip down memory lane and acknowledge doing code reviews was really hard for years, and now it’s laughably easy.

What is Code Review?

Simply, code review is when someone else looks at your code to critique for defects.  

Thus far the quote of the month has been:

We should’ve moved here 5 years ago.

So far Austin is amazing.  In true Freudian fashion, my fingers wrote that last sentence as ‘Austin is amazon."  :)  Amazon is amazing, too, but I can’t quite talk about that.

So, it’s August.   It’s 100 degrees every day, 81 degrees at 7 am, and it’s great.  Pollen counts are laughably low here, so everyone’s improving in their allergies.

A letter to myself in July 2015 from July 2016:

Dear sir,

This is your future self speaking.  Don’t question and go all ‘Dr Who’ on me, just listen.  

Your life is about to change.   You’ve worked at Lexmark for 16 years unofficially.  You’re looking forward to that congratulatory “15 years of service” email you’ll get on June 4th, 2016.  

You’ll never see it.  Let me explain a bit what’s going to transpire: