Web Minus One. Software is eating itself. “All watched over by machines of loving grace.”
Sep 21, 2021 • 33 tweets • 6 min read
Some reflections on The Gervais Principle, 5 years after first reading.
This is a business book that changed my life and I never believed there could be such a thing 📕
“All corporations are pathological” with its implication that corporations are built to be consumed, not built to last.
This was the central message of The Gervais Principle as far as I’m concerned.
It now informs every thought I ever have on work-as-imagined-vs-work-as-done.
Sep 18, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The Nigerian tech scene is one of the only bright spots in my twitter bubble. They’re discovering the joys of the Web as I got to back in the 2000s but they get to use all the modern stuff whereas I had IE6.
They’re not building ad networks to spy on each other, they’re
building technology that they see elsewhere on the planet and think would work in Nigeria.
“We got tired of waiting for Western tech to come to Nigeria so we built it ourselves” as a senior eng at Andela told me.
The joy of doing it yourself comes through in almost every tweet.
Sep 18, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
All jobs will be automated until only four remain: The Aristocrats!!!
So the father is just automating and automating whether or not it makes sense and meanwhile the mom is in a passenger rocket to Mars and it’s just spewing shit and vomit all over the place from its engines and the kids are getting caught in the automation and covered in the shit
First, it is extremely unusual (ime it never happens!) for an entry-level developer to be hired and then placed in charge of some kind of complex high-risk project.
You're going to be the most junior and the most recent hire. You're not going to be in charge of *anything.*
Jun 9, 2019 • 33 tweets • 14 min read
@alanpage It's very telling that manual testing is seen as cheap.
IME this perception exists because (as I have repeatedly seen at clients) the absolute most junior people are hired as testers in order to keep costs down. Because they’re so junior they don’t contribute very much. 1/2@alanpage 2/3 They stay junior because they have no mentorship (because mentorship is expensive).
The “5x to 15x” cost of automation proposed by the OP fits with this model: median developer pay is around $150k US. A team of five devs then costs ~$750k annually (considering TC only here)
Apr 15, 2019 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
technical debt is a better metaphor once you know that engineers don’t borrow from technical credit cards but rather from technical loan sharks
technical debt isn’t clean managed debt like business debt. it’s an obligation scrawled illegibly on a cocktail napkin.
Apr 9, 2019 • 37 tweets • 15 min read
Interaction Resiliency (iXR) is the practice of Software QA (aka #testing) as applied to "devops" or more properly Safety-II software delivery (aka continuous delivery & continuous deployment).
I put a name to "testing in devops" or "agile testing in continuous delivery" because a) those phrases are clumsy 😀 and b) the current discourse in #testing constantly collapses back on itself as big-A Agile + CDT are conflated time-and-time-again with Safety-II + Kaizen #iXR
Nov 24, 2018 • 36 tweets • 11 min read
The place where "testing vs. checking" starts to really leak (as all metaphors do but still…) is the Cartesian division of "things a human does" and "things a computer does."
First, Safety-II and therefore #devops, explicitly reject the Cartesian view of complex systems.
