11. Keeping Things Light During the Zombie Apocalypse

April Wensel on Software Developer’s Journey, Arup Chakrabarti on On Call Nightmares, Alistair Cockburn on Being Human, Brian Balfour on Product To Product, and Kent Beck on Unlearn.

I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected].

This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting May 13, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

APRIL WENSEL ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPER’S JOURNEY

The Software Developer’s Journey podcast featured April Wensel with host Tim Bourguignon. April talked about hiring for attitude and mindset over the technical skills of the moment. She distinguished between the fixed and growth mindset and talked about how hearing a statement from an interviewee like, “I’m just not good with people,” is a sign that the person is currently thinking with a fixed mindset.

Tim asked her to describe her company, Compassionate Coding. At Compassionate Coding, April teaches workshops on emotional intelligence to technical people. These skills are often called “soft skills,” but she prefers to call them “catalytic skills,” because they help technical people catalyze the application and acquisition of their other skills.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/45-april-wensel-encourages-us-to-get-in-touch-our-core/id1079113167?i=1000434465519

Website link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/190346/982475

ARUP CHAKRABARTI ON THE ON CALL NIGHTMARES PODCAST

The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Arup Chakrabarti of PagerDuty with host Jay Gordon. Arup talked about starting out in medical research and being exposed to the notion of on call because much of the research involved having access to cadavers that were only available in short time windows that required him, from time to time, to drive to the hospital on a Saturday night.

At Amazon, Arup learned what it looks like for not just individuals to go on call, but for whole departments and companies to go on call. At Netflix, he worked with the “father” of Chaos Monkey and managed site reliability as Netflix built out the simian army.

He told a story about a NTP time drift that alerted almost every team at PagerDuty. The SRE on call quickly diagnosed the problem as NTP, but their run list was broken, so getting things back took a while. During this time, Arup had to keep the engineers from disabling these constantly-firing alerts because that could have caused them to miss something critical. He says this incident taught him that incident response is a team sport.

This led to a discussion about the importance of keeping things light during an incident and taking the issue seriously without taking yourself seriously.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-21-arup-chakrabarti-pagerduty/id1447430839?i=1000436439951

Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-04-25T04_08_18-07_00

ALISTAIR COCKBURN ON BEING HUMAN

The Being Human podcast featured Alistair Cockburn with host Richard Atherton. Alistair talked about doing his Ph.D, being able to put the word “people” in the title of his dissertation (apparently a rare thing in academia), and how his heart sank when he realized that his own mentor’s dissertation on methodologies had already covered everything. Then he realized that if it really had covered everything, you could take it to any business in the world and it would solve their problems, but it doesn’t because businesses are made of people and no single methodology can solve all of the problems.

Alistair says instead that methodologies and processes should be like tissues: you use them and throw them away. After two or three months, you have to change. He says there are some good things about process, one being that it provides a checklist, like that which a pilot and copilot run through before an airplane takes off.

Often though, he says, processes are like drop boxes. You create them so that people don’t have to talk to each other. Companies that have communication problems often want Alistair to create a process for them to resolve those communication problems, unaware of the contradiction.

Alistair often has the same advice regardless of the methodology a client has chosen. If a client says, “We do SAFe,” he says, “That’s fine, increase collaboration!” If a client says, “We refuse to do SAFe,” he says, “That’s fine, increase collaboration!” He also says he doesn’t have to teach collaboration because everyone already knows how. We just don’t want to. 

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/56-the-heart-of-agile-with-alistair-cockburn/id1369745673?i=1000435504887

Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/afdb129e-9fcb-40e4-9243-b85f56f3e1b5.mp3

BRIAN BALFOUR ON PRODUCT TO PRODUCT

The Product To Product podcast featured Brian Balfour with host Eleni Deacon. They talked about north star metrics, that is, having one metric that attempts to capture all of the most important dimensions of your business. Brian doesn’t believe you can capture this in one metric and instead prefers a constellation of metrics that includes: 1) a retention metric such as monthly/weekly active users, 2) an engagement metric that measures the amount of engagement and the trend over time for those active users, and 3) a monetization metric.

He particularly doesn’t like revenue metrics because of their lagging nature and how they ignore actual usage.

Being on a data engineering team myself in my current role, I liked what Brian had to say about how to approach data. He says companies need to take on the mentality that data is not a project with a start and end date, but a core part of building product that is meant to constantly evolve.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/north-stars-are-leading-you-astray-brian-balfour-reforge/id1293415837?i=1000436155421

Website link: https://omny.fm/shows/product-to-product-podcast/north-stars-are-leading-you-astray-brian-balfour-r

KENT BECK ON UNLEARN

The Unlearn podcast featured Kent Beck with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked about the system that Kent uses to help him explore uncertainty. Kent says he has habits that help. The first habit is that of reversing any sentence that begins with the word “obviously.” When somebody says, “Obviously, programmers can’t be trusted to test their own code,” he automatically thinks, “What if that’s not true?”

A second habit is whenever somebody introduces Kent to a new model of thinking, he asks himself, “What would happen if I just acted like this model was true?” and he says that he applied that habit when reading Barry’s book Unlearn.

Barry asked about what made Kent feel that the Test-Commit-Revert (or TCR) technique was worth exploring, since this required an unlearning of Kent’s own Test-Driven Development (or TDD) method. Kent says that he was disenchanted with asynchronous code reviews and used a third habit of looking further forward. During his tenure at Facebook, he experienced growth in the number of engineers from 700 to 5,000. At the time, people were anticipating the problem of having 10,000 engineers working together, but Kent followed the Bill Joy idea of looking six steps further, and looked into how 100,000 engineers would work together. His solution was Limbo, or asking “How low can you go?” to shrink the size of code that can be safely committed and put immediately in production and the TCR technique came out of that line of thinking.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/exploring-uncertainty-with-kent-beck/id1460270044?i=1000436242318

Website link: https://barryoreilly.com/unlearn-podcast/

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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus