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Book look: Future babble, by Dan Gardner
I read “Future babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway” (Dan Gardner, 2010) when I was looking into a series of blog posts on “Minimum Viable Estimation”. There’s sometimes a view that the software industry in particular has problems with estimation – but this book has lots of evidence that predicting…
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Blogging about blogging, just this once
Every blog ends up here at some point: blogging about the process of writing posts, about the tech setup that makes the blog work, about the way the blog is laid out and organised … I’m planning to mention that stuff just once, in this post, and then get back to the kind of things…
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Notes from QCon London 2024
I spent 3 days at the QCon London conference, where I presented a talk about making change stick as part of Sophie Weston’s “How do teams really work” track. I’ve written a bit before about how useful I find putting a new talk together – it really helps me think through a topic and find…
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Deliver Sessions: Same goals, different roles
I’ve helped organise Deliver Sessions meetup for a few years, and now I try to write a few notes after each one so I remember all the good topics they cover. In March 2024 we were hosted at Zühlke’s office in Piccadilly Basin, where we had 3 talks and plenty of time to discuss them. All the…
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Agile in the Ether, IRL: Hacking bureaucracy
This is the last post in a series about Agile in the Ether’s first in-person event. So far we’ve had notes on: For the final workshop, Jen Oliver chose a subject familiar to lots of us: What are the sources of too-much-bureaucracy where you work, what frustrations does that cause, and – most importantly –…
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Agile in the Ether, IRL: Domain storytelling
In February 2024, Agile in the Ether had its first in-person event. I’ve written posts about the day’s first two workshops: building connections and beyond DORA. For notes on the third workshop, we’re trying something different: a guest post from Ian Ames! I’ve known Ian for years through the Agile in the Ether community –…
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Agile in the Ether, IRL: Beyond DORA
In February 2024, Agile in the Ether had its first in-person event – I wrote a bit about that in a previous post. Every part of the day gave me lots of ideas of things to look into further, or go and try – I’m making a few blog posts so I remember what I…
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Agile in the Ether, IRL: Building connections
I’ve been attending the online Agile in the Ether meetups, organised by Emily Webber, since 2019. It’s a brilliant community for talking through challenges and sharing ideas – so many knowledgeable people are happy to help each other out. The community’s found lots of ways to interact remotely, but recently we decided to try an…
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Time for ideas to spread
I saw a post from Kent Beck (author of Extreme programming explained, Tidy first, and lots more) on LinkedIn: Iodine was isolated in 1811. In 1813, iodine deficiency was proposed as the cause of thyroid problems like goiters. In 1954 the last canton in Switzerland (where iodine was especially scarce because glaciers) mandated iodized salt.…