This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.

Measuring Cyle Time with Dr. Cat Hicks - The Hanger DX Podcast, Ankit Jain

Cycle time is a measure lots of people use, but has no clear audience - developers, managers, CTOs all care about it. This makes it dangerous. Metrics have to be designed and used with psychological safety in mind. If people don’t trust the intention behind the metrics use, they’ll game it.

“Saying the quiet part out loud” is a phrase I’ve just made up, to describe a method of building alignment on practices within a team. It’s the habit of stating why you are doing things a certain way, even when you would assume it’s obvious.

I used to stress a lot about the “efficiency” of how I was using up all the minutes in my day. I’d to cram in as much as possible into time. eg. read on a 10 minute train, write code in the half hour before bed, etc.

While I stressed about it a lot, I never found that I did the “10x” things I read about that were supposed to emerge as a result of this extra “efficiency”. For example I have only finished one of the three side projects I started in 2016, despite promising myself that those wouldn’t take long.

In a team having knowledge that lives only in your head is a terrible thing.

• Humans are forgetful
• Humans are creative, especially when problem-solving
• Computers are not creative
• Computers are not forgetful

So we should get the computers to remember things, and allow the humans to do the creative parts.

Writing software is a creative activity. You start with a blank text file and end up convincing people to give you their identity details in exchange for the ability to poke someone over Facebook. If that’s not creative I don’t know what is.

It is upsettingly easy to work hard without being productive. The Lean Startup includes a quote I really liked:

“[People] feel that a good day is one in which they did their job well all day.”

The point being that this doesn’t account for whether you are doing the right work. This is a really common trap to fall in to. I know I have often worked really hard on something and produced code I’m very happy with, only to talk to my boss or the client and find that nobody else seems to be nearly as pleased with what I’ve produced as I am.

Why do I want to have my own site?

Narcissism mostly. I found the domain was available, decided as a self-respecting developer I should probably buy it. But then there’s no point owning a domain if you don’t put something there. So that was it really - I had to I had to get my act together and actually write the thing.

I enjoy developing

I’m a person who finds it hard to devote time outside of office hours to write code. I suspect it’s because I hate fun. Whatever the reason, if I’m not doing something useful, I won’t bother. So having decided I would like to code more, I had to find something useful to write.