Pair Programming is a great fit for large organizations because of this one unexpected benefit. CLICK NOW.
Also, links on leadership taking ownership instead of passing the buck, late 80s cornball music video hosting, and the dangers of banking as a service businesses.
I have another video today.
You've heard of pair programming and you probably think it's bonkers. Not many people benefit from this practice. Here, I go over how teams in the US military have been using pair programming to improve how they do software and spread that change to other teams. Some real DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!
Check out the blog post I based this on, it has a lot more on how other agile practices are helping out programmers in the DoD. And, as I mention, of course, all them free books you can get.
Relative to your interests
Passing the anxiety parcel - “And in organisations there’s a phenomenon I sometimes call anxiety pass the parcel… The higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more likely it is that you are going to be indulged by those below you, in trying to pass on to them your anxiety…. You think you are giving clear and direct leadership, but you’re also in a way, on another level, saying to the people below you here, you, you have my anxiety.”
Chris Elliott’s Friday Night Videos Collection, 1987–88 - This is the kind of thing that I ate a lot of in my media diet as a kid. With decades of perspective, I am intrigued by how this kind of stuff influenced me and my overall style.
Open Source Congress in Geneva - There’s a lot going on in the open source world at the moment, apart from licensing hijinks. Many more real-world things, e.g.: ’With the war raging in Europe, US/China rivalry heating up and AI promising to completely redefining our way of life, it is of little surprise that Open Source communities have increasingly heard alarm bells go off. As an overarching community, we’ve deal with export controls and suddenly being told to exclude contributors to projects. We’ve seen valuable contributors from certain countries excluded simply because of actions their leaders took that they had absolutely no path to influence. Some even fled their country and moved their entire families and lives. We’ve been asked how to handle contributions of AI generated code by hundreds of maintainers. We’ve had to defend and remind people that OSI is the organization that decides what licenses qualify as “open source” (particularly with SDOs). We’ve even had the perpetual “are you dead yet?” argument thrown around. Even if you consider just the regulatory issues facing open source in 2023 - including the CRA, PLD, AI Act (EU), Securing Open Source Software Act (US) and other examples - it is clear that the least various Open Source organizations can do is to educate the lawmakers on the consequences of their [in]actions and then prepare for the inevitable fallout (if they don’t listen). This includes preparing for things that will, if mandated by law, put an additional burden on all of Open Source organizations…' And, Roman goes on to list some.
DevRel Management and Leadership: Guidance, Skill Development, and Book Recommendations.
Banking as a service: The role of banks in powering the fintech industry - It does seem nuts to be a white-label bank, that is, someone else is the front-end and “owns” the customer: ’"As the low-cost provider to somebody else who owns the relationship, you’ve just sold your soul to the devil. … [W]e need to own the customer relationship, and we need to deserve to own the customer relationship through an offering that doesn’t need that fintech platform on the front end."’ // However, this is also the classic setup for disruption. The incumbent can’t go downmarket, follow the new model because it would damage their business, is not profitable compared to other things they could do, and just seems stupid. We’ll see.
Upcoming
Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.
Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.
Logoff
There’ve been some good blog posts on the Tanzu blog recently, but they don’t seem to get many views. So I wanted to see if I could drive some traffic to one of them that I liked.
In the video above, I tried multi-cam editing but by filing one video (on my iPhone) directly into Descript, and another one (with my “real” camera) with QuickTime. Syncing them up in Descript was pretty easy. Detail has a better method for cutting between scenes (a very good, clever method, with key shortcuts, that cuts the video and switches to the other camera at the same time). It’s weird that Descript doesn’t have multi-cam recording, but, whatever.
