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January 01, 2024 22:59 +0000  |  Activism Employment Environment Existential Dread Genocide Politics Travel War 1

It's been a long time. I try to do a Great Big Post every year, but I basically just skipped over 2022. Here it is, the start of 2024 and I honestly can't remember much of that year so... maybe that's a good reason to persist in writing these sorts of posts?

Personal

Anna Started School

The biggest deal of 2023 wasn't even for me, but for Anna. She started school. Here in the UK you start school at 4 years old in what they call "reception". It's basically kindergarten, but with more structured learning. Like, she's learning to read already, bringing home little books with 3-letter words in them: tip, tap, pat, etc. I don't remember learning to read 'til grade one (six years old in Canada), but maybe my memory is just faulty?

Regardless, Anna seems to really like it. We wrestled for a Very Long Time about which school to send her to and I think we picked a good one in the end. The teachers all seem really supporting and nurturing, and the kids all seem generally happy.

Ebike!

Part of the school decision involved another one: we finally went out and bought an e-bike. A Bicicapace (bitchy-ka-patchy) Justlong. The cargo box in the front is big enough to haul ~£100 of groceries, and the back can carry Anna and a friend, or even a full-grown adult... or a Great Big Dollhouse as we discovered. It's big, beautiful, fast, and relaxing... but not cheap. It came to about £4500 in total, which is the price of some cars. Of course, it costs around £14/year to power, doesn't burn the world, make noise, or kill pedestrians so... there's that.

#Solarpunk

I'm pretty sure that this was also the year that I discovered the term "solarpunk": an art form / political movement to imagine & build a world where we use technology to harness nature while living symbiotically within its limits. A post-capitalist utopia to stand against the cyberpunk feudalistic dystopian hellscape we've been trading on for decades. Think less Blade Runner and more Star Trek, but with a lot more green:

#solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk #solarpunk

It's not easy to explain how much of a relief it was for me to discover this new movement. Just the idea that there are still people who hope for, and envision a better world has done wonders for my morale.

I'll probably get into more of this in a much more depressing future post. For now though, I offer this excellent YouTube explainer from Our Changing Climate:

Via YouTube

Duolingo

I also started doing Duolingo in earnest back in July. I re-started originally without paying, but after a few days I looked into the costs and compared that to what I spend on dinner or even a Steam game. £60/year seemed like a good investment.

It actually feels like it's paying off. 6 months in and while I'm not yet able to even form a (useful) sentence, I'm understanding a lot more of what Christina & Anna are talking about. The problem for me is one of throughput: I take a really long time to translate a sentence, so long that by the time I understand what was said, 3 more sentences have passed me by. I'm getting better though and Duolingo is largely responsible.

Bye Reddit

And finally, I said goodbye to Reddit. I cut Twitter out at the end of 2021, but it took a while longer to get out of Reddit. My reasons were different though.

For Twitter, it was the way they were rage-farming. They would pit strangers against each other to make them angry, to drive up engagement, and thus sell eyeballs. In Reddit's case, I found most of the discussions informative, the news collected more accurate than what passes for such on television, and the community generally sharing my (progressive, left-leaning) ideals. Reddit however fell prey to enshittification, the process by which something is built initially for people and then made worse because some rich assholes want to extract profit from it.

When the CEO over there decided to lock out third party clients to lock users into their (ad-riddled) app, and then tried to blame app developers for the mess this created, I figured it was time to go. I didn't want to provide content to such contemptible assholes.

So I've switched over to Lemmy, which is sort of like Reddit, but federated (like Mastodon). The community is much smaller, but everyone seems much nicer too. There's even a solarpunk community!

Free Software

Late in the year, I started picking up Go, and ported my db program from the original Python to Go. The new version is much more portable, and once I've been using it for a few more months, I may just release it for the AUR.

If you're curious, here's the original Python version, and the new Go-based one.

Professional

My professional life was super chaotic this year. I switched jobs twice (and as of January 2nd, it's 3 times).

Limejump Becomes Shell

I joined Limejump back in 2020 and it was a fantastic job. I was using Shell's money (they were the parent company) to build green energy tech and was working with some brilliant, awesome people to do it. I did some of my best work of my career, working with my team to build something that few companies have managed to do (I can think of only one) in a language that I loved, with a team of fantastic people.

Then Shell decided that they wanted to roll Limejump into Shell proper and everything fell apart immediately. Worse though, is that being integrated into the company I started talking to actual Shell people, reading what they shared both publicly and on the internal network and realising how much of a mistake I'd made. Shell is intent on burning down the world, and they were using me to do it.

Goodbye Shell, Hello Utility Warehouse

I quit Shell quite publicly and found a new job at Utility Warehouse, this time my first role as a manager. The stack was different too, as they're using Go in a massively microservices-based system.

I worked there for four months, but was never really happy there for a lot of reasons I don't want to share here. So, after some spelunking through the job boards of some of my favourite companies in the UK, I found a new job at Octopus Energy.

Goodbye UW, Hello Octopus

I start at Octopus on January 2nd, so it's a good bet that by the time you're reading this, I will have already had my first day there. This job is going to be different as well. Where at Limejump I was a technical lead and at UW I was a manager, I'm dropping back into the technical saddle at Octopus as a staff engineer. Interestingly enough though, I won't be working in energy, but in water & broadband, which is fine by me. I've always been more interested in the technology than the domain.

Linux Training

One last thing on the professional front: I did a bunch more Linux training this year, teaching newbie Linux nerds how to Linux harder. I'm really enjoying this work, both in the curriculum creation as well as giving the actual workshops. It kind of feels like I got to go into education after all, but with more money and no children.

Travel

Alas, having children generally means that grand travel plans just don't happen. As expats, when we do leave the country, it's to go to places we've already been to see Anna's grandparents.

Anna Visits Canada

Anna got to see Canada for the first time this year, flying the full 9 hours across the Atlantic to Calgary and another hour to Kelowna with little to no screaming. Seriously, I was dreading this trip, but Anna was on point for so much of it. I'm super proud of her (and appreciative!)

The trip was basically just to see my family in the Okanagan, with a week staying at my brother's place, and another week with my parents. Both were very welcoming and thrilled to have Anna around, and Anna had a great time drawing with Grandma and bouncing on the trampoline with her cousins. We even had Violet over for a sleep over one night and the girls camped out on the pull out watching the fantastic Song of the Sea.

My takeaway from the trip though was a lot more depressing. I have never felt more isolated in my life than when I was trapped in my brother's house, on top a mountain with no car. Seriously, what the fuck is up with North American city planning? They carve a bunch of winding roads into a mountain, stack some monster trucks on it and call it "home". You can't even leave your home without climbing (and I do mean climbing) into a $50,000 beast vehicle just to drive 5minutes to a gas station. There are no sidewalks, just monster trucks! I don't get it. How is this "freedom"?

A month in Greece

The latter part of the Summer had us fly to Greece to see Anna's other grandparents. We went to sleep with the air full of smoke from fires across the valley, this at a time when Canada was also on fire. We piled into a car and drove from Athens literally through the smoke North through to Corinth (Κόρινθος) and then South all the way to Panagia (Παναγία) where we stayed at a lovely little hotel a short walk from the beach.

I relaxed on my own, writing some code in the hotel room while Christina and her parents took Anna down to the sea for a swim, I got to swim with a sea turtle, which was pretty amazing, and perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, the food was fantastic.

Activism

Extinction Rebellion's Self-neutering

Once a force to be reckoned with, XR opened 2023 with an abdication of its role as disruptor, instead opting for a more inclusive "numbers oriented" civilised protest. Not long after, everyone pretty much stopped caring about anything they had to say.

Just Stop Oil

Out of XR's rejection of civil disobedience however, Just Stop Oil was born. Currently they mainly favour "slow marches" (blocking traffic, but still moving so they can't be arrested, a loophole that no longer applies, read on) and throwing paint on everything from building doors to priceless works of art.

For the most part, they're treated like an annoyance in the media here, but they're being talked about all the time. They've had some truly exceptional media coverage, and so it would seem that their tactics are working.

There's even been a documentary made about them by Chris Packham (famous nature docs guy here in the UK) called Is it time to break the law?.

Just Stop Oil feels like a beginning. Few people blocking traffic or throwing paint actually believe that this will fix things. They're doing this out of desperation because they know that no matter how much they recycle, those with the power to keep the world from burning will still choose fire. It represents a sort of collective awakening, where we can all start talking about how this isn't up to us, and about who actually needs to change. It's the next step on the path toward real violence, and I don't think the establishment really understands this yet.

#FuckCars, #BanCars, #StrongTowns

This was also absolutely the year of the anti-car movement. The pandemic changed a lot of things, including where people live and how they work. With these changes, we're seeing an emergence of welcomed car-hate. From deflating SUV tires in London (this article is from 2022, but whatever) to banning cars parking on the sidewalk in Scotland, to Wales setting the default speed limit to just 20mph (32kph), cars are finally getting some push-back over here.

We also saw the introduction of the 15 minute city idea, which of course was immediately jumped on by poorly educated conspiracy nuts as "government control", as if requiring that everyone own and be able to operate a $50,000 vehicle is even remotely freeing.

Across the Atlantic, the Strong Towns movement is taking root in cities across the US and Canada to take space away from cars and give it back to people.

Oh, and I forgot Paris! With their fantastic activist mayor has been exploding cycling adoption across one of the most (formerly) car-dominated capitols in Western Europe.

When I need a source of optimism, this is where I look.

Politics

2023 felt very much like a tsunami of terrible news on the international scale. Fascism, oppression, and just straight-up burning down the world are all on the rise, along with profits for the rich and poverty for everyone else.

Local

Here in Cambridge, there was a push by the sitting council for a plan called the Sustainable Travel Zone: effectively a congestion charge within the city proper which would be used to pay for improved transit and active transport infrastructure.

They later killed it, thanks to a combination of extremely vocal opposition, and straight-up cowardice of those in power. Basically, there were enough swing votes that didn't want to blow their chances at another political race later, so they came down against something they initially favoured.

So now we have insurmountable traffic, absolutely no plan to address it, and a carbrained public that'll probably still vote Conservative because they're idiots.

UK

This country has been ruled by Tories since 2010, and in 2023 they actually had three different Prime Ministers because the quality of their options was so miserable.

Boris Johnson got the boot, not because of his racism, ineptitude, or robbery of the public purse to enrich his friends. No was kicked out of power because he had a Christmas party during COVID lockdown. It was a shit thing to do, but compared to his long long list of reasons why he never should have been permitted to hold the office in the first place, I think this says a lot about the UK public.

He was followed by Liz Truss, whose term was literally outlasted by a head of lettuce. In just 49 days, she brought in financial policy so damaging that it nearly bankrupted the pensions of the entire country. Legislation that was so toxically neoliberal that even the IMF was critical.

Finally, she was replaced by Rishi Sunak who ran unopposed. He's a billionaire parasite who appears to be making it his goal to do as much damage to the country as possible before he leaves.

  • They've passed draconian laws to effectively ban protest, which have already been used to jail people for six months whose only crime was blocking traffic while walking slowly.
  • They're curtailing local council powers to ensure that they can't bring in lower speed limits.
  • And they're opening up new oil & gas fields in the North Sea in the middle of a climate emergency.

Via YouTube

All this, while the Labour party has been overrun by do-nothing-change-nothing Tories in red, who when asked about what they'd do differently, overwhelmingly answer "not a thing".

The state of UK politics is dire.

Canada

Canada's reputation continues to be great, what with our RCMP attacking, arresting, and intimidating indigenous peoples at the behest of fossil fuel companies trying to kill us all.

Via YouTube

Ukraine

After nearly two years, Ukraine is still fighting for survival against Putin's end-of-life crisis. They've held out much, much longer than most expected, partially due to the demonstrated ineptitude of the Russian military, but most of the world seems to agree that the steely resolve of the Ukranians is the primary factor.

They've developed a new form of warfare in this theatre, leveraging consumer-grade drones to fly both surveillance and attacking missions, even managing to strike targets on Russian soil. There are thousands of videos shared on social media filmed by drones that're being used to guide artillery to cut down tanks and infantry.

Europe and Nato have been slow to work out just what they want to do on this front, but I think there's near consensus that either you fund Ukraine, or you fund Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, and Romania once Russia moves onto them. When you're dealing with a country that lies so easily and attacks civilians so readily, aiding your neighbour is a form of self-defence.

Palestine

Which I suppose, brings me to Israel's campaign of genocide.

On October 7th, Hamas broke out of the open-air prison that is Gaza, murdered 766 Israeli civilians and 373 security forces, and took 247 civilian hostages. The attacks were brutal, with some even wearing bodycams to stream the footage.

Israel was caught largely unprepared, despite having advance knowledge up to a year earlier complete with blueprints. Their response however has been methodical.

At last count, an estimated 20,000 Palestinians are dead, mostly civilians, nearly half of which are children. They're telling the civilians to evacuate to areas onto which they later drop 2000-pound bombs. I've seen video of IDF soldiers attempting to throw grenades at ambulances and journalists -- stopping short only when they realise they're on camera, and I've seen harrowing video of children burned alive.

This is genocide. It's being conducted by our "friends" with our help, our weapons and with our blessing.

We are complicit, and this will haunt us all for generations.

And I swear that if you leave a comment about how "I just don't understand", "but Hamas bad", or "Israel is just defending itself", not only will I not publish it, but I may not speak to you again.

COP 28

And then there was COP 28, a climate conference so important, we decided that it'd be a good idea to put the CEO of an oil company in charge of it. The result of this conference was the weakest language they could possibly get away with, including absolutely no commitment to phase out fossil fuels.

So that's awesome. It's not like we didn't have to evacuate fucking Yellowknife this year due to wildfires. I'm sure this whole climate thing is nothing to worry about. The economic fallout from choosing not burn every last drop of oil would surely be worse than acidified oceans and desertified crop lands. It's not like any of the people making these decisions will be alive when this becomes a problem.


So yeah. I have a lot of rather existential dread of late, and I want to write about that some more later 'cause there's a lot I wanna say on that topic. Needless to say 2022 was pretty bad and 2023 was worse. I fully expect 2024 to follow the same trajectory.

Though at least we have this to look forward to. Oh, and this.

August 18, 2023 09:44 +0000  |  Climate Change Employment Environment Shell 3

That's it, I'm out. It took me longer to find the exit than I would have liked, but such is life. I'm actually sad to be leaving some of the people there, but I'm afraid I'll be wrestling with the moral quandary that is my contribution to Shell's bottom line for the rest of my life.

When I started working at Limejump, I honestly believed that I was doing the Right thing: using Shell's oil money to build a green future. I know now how naïve that was.

Once we were TUPE-transfered into the parent company, it became clear to me how Shell really works, and perhaps more alarmingly, how so many working there perform appalling mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they're doing good things for the world.

From the Orwellian "Respect for Nature" scrawled on the walls of the office, to the contemptible climate denialism you hear from staff at all levels, it's clear that too many of the people working there truly believe that they're somehow making the world better even when confronted with the evidence.

There are of course some great people still there, attempting to "change the company from within", but it's a fool's errand if you ask me. Shell has known about the climate crisis for decades and every new generation of management since has worked to support and expand fossil fuel extraction. This latest crop is no different. Their performance at Shell's latest AGM where they straight up denied that their plans violate our Paris obligations in the face of clear evidence should divorce anyone of the illusion that Shell is on the right side of history. So long as it's profitable to burn the world, Shell will continue to provide the fuel.

What's more, even if Shell were interested in achieving a carbon free world (its actions say otherwise of course), I don't think it's capable.

Shell is a Very Large Company that's spent more than a century doing one thing: digging stuff out of the ground and setting it on fire. They're heavily invested in this pattern, with infrastructure all over the planet and tens of thousands of employees dedicated to it. They've got armies of lobbyists working to preserve that model in every country that matters and mountains of amoral investor cash lined up to support it too.

Combine this with the reality that big corporations can't pivot because of the black hole of inertia all of the above represents, and you get what happened to Limejump: a small renewables start-up, bought by a Big Corporate Fossil Fuel Company, after which it's swallowed and dismantled -- its goal of a renewable energy future lost.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of working there was the way staff and management would attempt to separate their actions from the ethical implications: "Don't blame us, the world demands energy. We're simply supplying it."

This is a convenient lie Shell employees tell themselves, crafted to obfuscate the fact that Shell has leveraged substantial lobbying efforts on all sides of the political arena to ensure a fossil future. They lobby (or fund 3rd parties to lobby) government and the public to crush green legislation and expand support for fossil fuels, all while repeating "net zero by 2050" as if merely saying it is sufficient.

These are not the actions of a company looking to embrace a carbon-free future. They're not even those of a company hoping to expand their portfolio to include renewables. This is a concentrated effort by the one arm of the company to crush the business of the other arm, a tactic that only makes sense if the renewable side exists exclusively to greenwash the fossil one.

Maybe this is obvious to you, but 2½ years ago, I really couldn't see it, so I'm sharing what I've learnt now.

To future generations: I'm sorry. I never contributed to Shell's fossil fuel business, but I did build systems that Shell used to distract the public from what they're really doing. I honestly believed I was helping, but for over two years I was part of the problem.

To my brilliant Limejumper colleagues that I've left behind: I'll miss you all and hope that one day soon you come to the same realisation as I have: that your skills are valuable, that Shell is using them to burn down the planet, and that you can do better.

Image credit: Rosemary Mosco

July 28, 2023 11:56 +0000  |  Employment Management Software 0

When I started as tech lead at Limejump, it was my dream job. Finally, I was going to be able to actually lead a project's technical direction, rather than spend a whole lot of time arguing about how I thought it should work. As it turned out, this job was a whole lot more than that, and all of it has been a fantastic experience.

Now that I'm leaving though, I find myself having to explain just what my job is for those that will step in to replace me and I thought it pertinent to write this all down. Maybe someone will see it and find it useful, or maybe they'll call me out on my bullshit. Either way, the result will likely be net-positive.

External Relations

The idea that as technical lead I'd be spending a big chunk of my time not talking to my team at all was a big surprise, but that's how this has worked out. Over the last 2½ years, a surprising amount of my work has consisted of communication with other teams, our product owner, my manager, and even upper management directly.

Coordination

For the most part, a lot of the comms are about coordination. My team needs X to be finished by Team Y, so I'm talking to them about what they need to get X done. I can then later go back to my team and set reasonable expectations about the future, which will sometimes include a conversation about workarounds for the interim.

It's more than just harassing other teams about deadlines though. In many cases, I'll be asking for advice around what those teams are doing, what works best for them, what they might need from us or trying to arrive at a consensus of best practice across the company.

It goes the other way too. Other teams, when curious about what mine is doing, will usually just reach out to me directly. "Why does service X do Y? Can it do Z instead or as well?" This is a big part of my day.

Technical PR

If your team builds Something Awesome, but no one knows about it, it'll never be used, and so those efforts are effectively wasted. So part of my job is talking to other teams (usually just the nerds) and promoting some of the cool stuff we're doing. Maybe we've got a new library we think others might benefit from, or a new process for our CI that has improved things. Talking about this with other nerds earns our team respect and helps the company as a whole build on our experience.

Taking those Meetings Bullets

No one likes going to meetings, especially engineers who would rather be writing code. Honestly, I'd much rather engineers never have to be in any meeting they don't want to be in 'cause their contributions toward actually building things are much more valuable. To that end, if someone has to go to a meeting, I usually volunteer. It's my job to know everything about what my team is doing technically, so theoretically I should be able to advise on any subject related to what we're doing. Let the nerds do what they love instead.

Criticising Management

When I became a tech lead, I thought I'd never be in a situation again where I had to argue with my boss about the right direction for things, but I've learned that as you move up the chain, you're still writing software, just through additional layers of abstraction ;-)

There have been a few times where upper management has made decisions that I've disagreed with. Whether it was a choice to keep an antiquated legacy service alive, or to migrate a bunch of systems to another standard, it's my job to be critical of things I disagree with.

Sometimes I've been persuasive, and other times I've simply had to adopt a position of "well, at least the truth is where it needs to be". I've even reconsidered my position a few times and gone back to my team to support the new direction. In any case, I think it's important that a tech lead speak out when they see the company doing something they think is wrong. It's basically a big reason they're paying us.

Institutional Knowledge

As someone who's not necessarily deep in the code but rather leading a team of people developing (19!) different projects, I'm in the unique position to be able to "mostly know what's going on" in a lot of different areas. As employee turnover churns, that knowledge becomes more valuable, such that on any given day, about 20% of my conversations are from newer colleagues asking me why something is the way it is and if it can be safely changed to do something else.

A lot of companies think that you can solve this problem with thorough documentation, but in a start-up atmosphere, where things are developed, tested, partially adopted, and then thrown away because of a discovered failure (move fast and break things!), expecting that everything be documented is a bit nuts. Even if you could document it all, no one would ever read it. Hell, if you've read this far into this post, you're probably in the 1%.

So, the best you've got in a lot of cases is good communication between your longer-running staff and the newer staff. Make sure people ask why a lot, so we can pass on lessons learnt.

Greasing the Wheels

My team is awesome and they all really know what they're doing, but sometimes they run up on something that blocks their progress. If that problem is political (management needs to fix something, or someone above needs to approve something) then they go to our engineering manager, but if it's technical they come to me.

I have a lot of days where I'll spend an hour or more with my nerds troubleshooting a problem, pair programming, or just fiddling with configurations together to get things working. Sometimes it's just me sitting in for some technical advice/guidance, and sometimes we're learning together. Either way, my involvement is usually only momentary, getting the engineers un-stuck so they can carry on being awesome.

Mentoring

Probably my favourite part of this job has been the mentoring. I've worked with some really brilliant people at various stages in their careers. With 23years behind me, I get to play the "Elder Nerd" and talk about "that one time where I worked at a company where X happened".

The key thing here for me is that you have to put the interests of the person you're mentoring over the interests of the company as a whole. If you don't, they'll know it and they won't trust you. I think I've managed to cultivate a reputation where people know that I'll always be straight with them, and that's allowed me to have some really great conversations about personal and career development. I've also made some great friends.

Technical Direction

Much of what I do as a technical lead is not technical direction at all.

Imagining the Future

This was the most daunting part of the job when I applied for the role. I figured I was a pretty good coder, but could I actually lead a team? Why they hell would anyone follow me? I decided to look back on all of the tech leads I'd had over the years and apply the good stuff (obviously) but also look deeply at the truly terribly bosses I'd had and decidedly do the opposite.

To that end, I didn't direct the team at all. Instead, I spent months just getting to know the team, the context, and the various codebases we were responsible for. Over time I started to sketch out a diagram of where I thought we should be and updated it daily through various conversations.

After all that time, I had a pretty good idea of where I figured we should be going, but critically I never tried to impose that vision on the team. Instead, I used it to inform my conversations with them and slowly nudge us in the direction I wanted. The idea was to make sure that the team as a whole decided to go in a direction collectively with some guidance, rather than just slapping a diagram on the screen with "Ok kids, here's where we're going!"

Some concessions were made of course, but they were never treated like battles won or lost because there was never a battle at all. We decided, as a team to build things this way. I've been really happy with the result, and I believe, so has the rest of the team.

Code Review

I don't write a lot of code these days, but I review tonnes of it. With a team of 5 other engineers churning out multiple PRs each a day, I'm usually the one going through that code.

For the most part, I'm not looking for bugs. Instead, I'm trying to make sure that the code is:

  • Safe: Have we made any decisions that could leak data or pose a security risk?
  • Boring:
    • Does it conform to standards?
    • Is it needlessly clever?
    • Can someone who's never seen this code before understand what it does easily?
    • Does it violate the principle of least surprise?
    • Is it self-documenting, or do I need a probably-out-of-date document to understand it?
  • Tested: I mandate 100% test coverage, allowing for explicit exceptions that must be defended during review. This may sound extreme, but the result is code that can be regularly and easily updated. On our projects, a complete Django update takes about 1hr of developer time, while at previous companies it was weeks or even months of work combined with a lot of fear & uncertainty.
  • Performant: This is where I get to say things like: "We did this at Y company back in the day and it didn't go well, maybe try Z instead."

I also try to give some time to questions around broader architecture. Should we be storing this code here, or should we instead be moving it into a different folder or even an external library or service? Sometimes these questions are more meant for later conversations though.

The pattern we usually follow is that unless there are "show stopper" bugs, security flaws, or violations of any team standards, I usually mark the PR as "Approved" and let the engineer decide if they're going to implement any of my suggested changes. It's a collaborative effort, and engineers shouldn't feel like their tech lead is writing their code for them.

Compromise

However every once in a while someone writes something that I just think is a Bad Idea. It's not that the code is bad, but rather that it takes the wider codebase in a direction I'm not comfortable with.

This is a Hard Problem for me. In these instances I struggle with balancing what I think is the right direction for the project and making someone on my team feel like they've wasted their time, or worse, that I think they're a bad engineer. What follows is usually a dance of egos and an attempt to find some middle ground, which is not always possible.

This sometimes is a battle, and in the end, someone will have to give a little. I like to think that I've been reasonably conciliatory, but I guess I'll leave it up to my colleagues to be the judge there.

Cheerleading

Humans aren't ants. We need a reason to keep going, so if you work at a job that feels soul-crushing, you won't work there very long if you know what's good for you.

Collective Ownership

I can't take credit for this idea, as I'm pretty sure that Rob, our perpetual team sunshine inspired this, but I'm a big proponent of it:

If you write the code, and I review it, it's not your code anymore. It's our code.

A lot of companies talk about "no fault retros" or a "culture of shared responsibility", but in 23years I've never seen it done as well as we've managed in our team. Somehow, we've managed to foster this culture of collective ownership to the point where we carefully choose our pronouns when talking about our work.

  • "The server fell over when it received X"
  • "We made a change last week to call Y when X was received"
  • "Alright no problem, let's make a ticket for this so we can patch it up for tomorrow's release."

If someone tries to claim ownership of a bug or failure, someone always reminds them that they didn't cause this problem, we did. The result is a team that celebrates individual and collective successes and takes on failures as a shared burden.

Morale

Sometimes things suck. Sometimes there's a load of work ahead, or a colleague has left, or a project was killed. Whatever the cause, as the lead it's at least partially my job to try to keep spirits up, to make what needs to be done feel achievable.

Honestly, this is one of the harder parts for me as it always feels forced. I mean, I'm usually a rather emotional and animated person, but it's hard to step out of myself and try to illicit a particular feeling in others, especially if it's for the benefit of a company rather than a person.

The same goes for good news though. Pitching a subsidised night out to management when a project is delivered on time, or even just to acknowledge the efforts of individuals is a pretty great part of the job.

Actual Code

I used to have a tech lead that would regularly lament: "I didn't even get to write any code today!". As one of his engineers at the time, I thought that this was a pretty weird thing to get worked up about. After all, I was writing code all the time and it wasn't that great.

You start missing it though. If you're in a job where you're only ever looking at other people's code and not writing any of your own, you get... itchy.

Ticketed Work

I'm in stand-up every day, and I try to regularly take a ticket and hack away on it throughout the week. This work generally takes a back seat to everything above though, so I try to avoid taking any work that might require a lot of time or upon which other tickets depend so I don't end up blocking anyone.

Usually, I try to sharpshoot tickets whose work will inform future development, so that I can establish what I think are good patterns for what's coming down the pipe, but it doesn't always work out that way.

Gardening

Finally, if everything else is accounted for, I try to do a little of what I affectionately call "gardening": the process of looking at existing code and creating a pull request to make it a little more stable, performant, or just developer-friendly. Most of the team is focused on churning through tickets, and sometimes improvements are overlooked: typos in comments, missing type hints, somewhat kludgy ways of doing things that could be a lot cleaner and simpler if afforded the time and attention. On days when I need a break, I do some gardening, create a PR, and ask that someone review it when they've got a moment.


And that's it. That's my job. It's a whole lot more than I expected it to be when I answered the recruiter 2½ years ago, but to be honest, I really like it. It's kind of the perfect middle ground between hands-off management and hands-on trench work, and I wish more companies followed a model like this.

At my next job, my title will be "engineering manager", but as I understand it, the role won't be all that different, just with added line-management responsibilities. This probably means I'll have even less direct code access, but that's fine by me. I can satisfy the "itch" with some Free software projects. 😆

July 23, 2021 16:22 +0000  |  Climate Change Employment Ethics Shell 1

Update: 2½ years later, I've realised how naïve this was and outlined that naïvety in a separate post.

I made a career decision a few months ago that I've meant to document here for a while now. I left my previous job at Workfinder that was making me miserable, for an amazing job with a green energy company called Limejump.

The people I work with are wonderful. They're both technically capable and respectful human beings. I'm not just talking about my immediate colleagues either. In my 7 months with the company, this has been my experience with everyone I've worked with there -- all the way up to the CEO. People are friendly, enthusiastic, and professional. The team collectively owns mistakes and works together toward common goals that we (the business and engineering) establish together. Seriously, it's pretty great.

I cannot stress enough how powerfully black & white the move has been for me. To come from a job where the higher-ups regularly micromanaged, second-guessed, and belittled everyone and then shoved us under the bus when things went wrong, to where I am now is really quite jarring. I'd spent so much time being miserable that I'd forgotten what it was like to work with decent people.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, I'm here to remind you that not every company is as toxic as the one you're stuck in. If you have options, get out while you can! Hell, if you can roll code, I might be able to find you a spot with us.

So yeah, that's the good news: I'm finally happy in a job again. I'd forgotten what that was like, so the experience still leaves me a bit giddy, even after 7 months.

"So why the dire-sounding title?" I hear you asking. Well, Limejump comes with a significant piece of baggage that I had to unpack and come to terms with before accepting the job. That's the real topic of this post: Limejump is owned by Shell.

Yes, that Shell.

If you know me personally, it's likely that you know that I have some hard lines I don't cross for employment. I don't do guns, I don't do fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do anything illegal. The reasoning behind this is one of conscience, but it's also rational: gaining financially from destroying the world you have to live in makes absolutely no sense. Shell violates the fossil fuel rule fundamentally, and historically has a long documented history of Evil under its belt.

And yet, here I am, taking a paycheque from Shell, and to my mind, doing so with my morals intact. That probably sounds antithetical, so let me explain:

The way I see it, Shell is a publicly-traded company that must, like any other, do evil. It's insane, but this is how capitalism works: a publicly-traded company can't knowingly refrain from doing evil if doing so means that it will make less (or even lose) money for its shareholders. If your goal then is to save the earth from companies like Shell, you have but two choices:

  1. Make Shell illegal. Sue them into oblivion or figuratively kill them by revoking their charter to exist.
  2. Find a way to make doing evil less profitable than doing good.

To be clear, I am all for Option #1, but no amount of screaming from my blog is going to work on that front, so unless activists and human rights lawyers have a need for some high-level software design, I'm afraid I'm not much use to that cause. I have however been offered an opportunity to move on option #2.

Limejump is doing something extremely ambitious and technically difficult: we're developing a framework for consolidating disparate green energy sources into a sort of distributed power plant that compensates for all of the fluctuations inherent in green energy solutions. Sometimes the wind isn't blowing, and the sun isn't always shining, and yet you need power for your laptop at 3am.

The number of companies on the planet even bothering to try to solve this problem is tiny and almost none of them have the sort of resources that Shell brings to the table. If we can prove that this is viable (spoiler alert: it definitely is, we're doing it), then the reality of free, limitless energy becomes a serious "carrot" to pull companies like Shell away from fossil fuels. Combine that with the "stick" in actions like Extinction Rebellion, law suits, rising fuel prices, and political pressure, and I believe that you can steer this earth-killing beast of a ship into a force for Good. Not because I believe that a company can have a conscience (it can't), but because that's where the money is.

Until or unless Option #1 can happen, this sort of work needs to be done, so I took the job. I hope it was the right choice and that I'm not being naïve. I suppose that's a question for Future Me, but for right now, it honestly feels like the Right decision.

January 03, 2021 21:16 +0000  |  Economy Employment Free Software Health Politics Software 0

This year sucked. That line is probably enough to remember the nightmare that is 2020 when I'm (hopefully) looking back on this post in 10 years, but as it's my tradition to go into depth on the past year at the start of a new one, let's go a bit deeper into the why this year sucked so much.

The Pandemic

This was the year that the COVID-19 pandemic took off. Lockdowns all over the world started around March and for the more civilised countries (New Zealand, Taiwan, a few others) that was the end of it. The rest of the world however could not get our shit together.

From the talks of "natural herd immunity" to the politicising of the virus and its prevention as a left-wing conspiracy, nearly every country failed to do the right thing in the most calamitous way possible.

It's left the people with a sense of reason exhausted. I mean, we have experts in this field. Those experts told us what we needed to do to stem the spread. Our leaders overwhelmingly did not heed that advice and chose instead to let 1.8 million people die (so far).

Even while mass graves were being dug in New York, leaders in nearly every nation were refusing to even close the schools. Here in the UK, (home of the famous "take it on the chin" comment by our fearless leader) we had policies that actually encouraged people to eat out at local pubs, and no mask mandate. Now the UK wears the dubious distinction of being the source of a much more virulent strain of the virus. Other countries have closed their borders to us, but nearly all continue with anti-science policy that inevitably leads to more death.

Vaccine Development

There's some good news though: 3 promising vaccines have made their way through a (very rushed) development & testing process to be cleared for emergency use in Europe and North America (and presumably elsewhere). The roll out has (unsurprisingly) been a mess here in the UK, and now there's talk of actually mixing-and-matching the vaccines which sounds insane to me, but again, unsurprising given the kind of leadership this country has.

From my (admittedly ignorant) read of the science behind this though, I'm currently on-board with getting a vaccine (or a "jab" as they call it here) when it's made available to me. As I understand the risks of so-called "Long COVID" vs. the nature of an mRNA vaccine, it's still a smart move in my mind.

Radicalised

Was 2020 a “bad year” or are we simply approaching the inevitable conclusion of living under an economic system that is fundamentally incompatible with human dignity and happiness?

Throughout all of this, I've become more "radicalised". My contempt for capitalism is more palpable, and I'm angrier every day.

All of this, all of this is a direct result of capitalism. From the Chinese government refusing to crack down on wild/exotic animal wet markets, to the world's pandering to their carelessness, to their covering up of the outbreak until it was too late, to the world's reluctance to close the borders, to anti-science policies in nearly every nation treating the working public like expendable peasants. All of it is driven by capitalism:

China

We've continued to trade with China and support their economy because it's profitable for the rest of us. It doesn't matter that they commit genocide or are among the worst polluters on the planet. We pretend that this is only their problem when logically we know that it isn't. The same is true for their public health regulations.

We knew that China's public health policy was a breeding ground for pandemics. We've seen it before. But isolating them? Punishing them for being a threat to world health? That would affect our profits.

And so we did nothing and China acted exactly as everyone knew they would.

Management once the pandemic started

The science was clear on all of this:

  • Close the borders
  • Close the schools, the churches, the markets, and the malls
  • Limit travel
  • Limit the spread by keeping people at home
  • Track and trace infected cases

But we all had rent and mortgages to pay. Around 300 million of us (the Americans) couldn't even have medical care if they were unemployed. How could anyone possibly do the right thing and follow the science?

Our governments could have stepped in. They could have put a moratorium on rent and mortgages. They could have mandated the expansion of grocery store delivery networks and required that no one be permitted to go to work if that work is not directly involved in a key industry like the food supply, public health, utilities, or the military.

The right thing would have been to do this for just a month or two and get a handle on the virus. Limit its spread and understand its behaviour. It could have been financed through a wealth tax or some other fiscal tool levied against those profiting from the pandemic.

We didn't do this though, because capitalism demands that we all go to work doing jobs that don't really matter so that the very rich few continue to accumulate wealth. It's a given that millions will die, but it's also understood we're all replaceable.

Disaster Capitalism

All of this is what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism": the idea that disasters are leveraged (if not also created) by people who profit from them.

There are absolutely winners in all of this: Amazon and Tesco for example both posted record profits while exploiting their workforce. As The Guardian pointed out:

Bezos has accumulated so much added wealth over the last nine months that he could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic.

None of this is to say that there's some sort of illuminati cadre of rich assholes running the world. Only that the world is as it is because these sorts of people profit from it the way things are rather than how we all know they should be.

We don't need 2¢ USB sticks from China or next-day delivery of slippers from Amazon. We need a universal basic income, nationalised health care, and a government that understands the economy as a system of land, water, and people rather than currency.

This pandemic has happened entirely because we have prioritised personal wealth over humanity.

It's not just a bad year

Towards the end of the year, it became fashionable to refer to how we'll all be glad that 2020 is over, because somehow everything was going to be better in 2021. Nothing has changed though, and so even if the vaccine is rolled out smoothly and the pandemic subsides, all of this — in one form or another — will happen again because that is what this system was designed to do.

The worst is yet to come. Next up we're looking down the barrel of a crippling depression and the appallingly inevitable climate catastrophe. The skies above California literally turned red this year, and yet that nation still has no salient climate plan. The world community has done little more than talk about how we should probably do something, but fossil fuels are still subsidised by nearly every industrialised nation.

There's a reason you feel like things have only been getting worse: they have. Disaster capitalism is as much about profiting off of disaster as it is about demoralising the peasantry and keeping us fearful. We've been "holding on" for so long, hoping for things to get better when they absolutely will only get worse so long as we live under this system.

In Other World News

Despite the pandemic, there were a lot of things that happened worth noting that happened this year:

Black Lives Matter

George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and the country, the world was (finally) enraged. From what I've been hearing, very little has come of the rage though, as the pandemic has made mobilisations difficult. Still, calls for defunding or abolishing the police are finally being taken seriously, so that's a start.

Trump

Trump made it through all four years and got clobbered in an attempt at re-election. I maintain that if this pandemic hadn't happened, he would have won a second term (I have that little faith in the US), but with more than 350,000 dead so far and millions losing their jobs, there was no way he was going to win in a fair fight.

The question then was how much would the Republicans have to cheat to win this one, and they did their best: everything from gerrymandering, to restricting access to voting places, to sabotaging the postal system. None of it was enough to give Trump a win, though it may well have been enough to hold onto the Senate. We'll know in a few days with the Georgia run-off vote.

Oh, and there's widespread claims that the election was somehow fraudulent, and that Trump was actually the winner. This has led to Trump-devotees holding (maskless, of course) rallies calling for the arrest of Joe Biden.

And one more thing: Q-Anon is a thing now. There's a lot of overlap between these nuts and the nuts claiming that Trump actually won.

My Life, Directly

In comparison to any of the above, my life doesn't exactly feel significant, but this is my blog, so I'm going to cover that too.

Lockdown

The (limited) lockdown we had here in the UK was rough. I was just holding onto my sanity, being able to send my 1 year old away to the child minder during the work-week, but when that was all cancelled, Christina and I became full-time babysitters while also being full-time employees.

We "managed" this by working in shifts. I would work 4 hours while Christina looked after Anna, then I'd take care of Anna for four hours while Christina worked. When Anna napped midday, we'd both work, and when dinner came around, one of us would cook while the other took care of the kid, then she'd go down and both of us would go back to work 'till 11 or midnight at which point we'd go to sleep only to repeat this... for the entire month.

I won't complain though. It was hard, but at least we remained employed through the fortune of having remote-friendly work. I know that a lot of people in this country were looking down the barrel of no income and substantial rent to pay, so I know that we've been very fortunate.

Our childminder was freaking out when she heard the news that she couldn't keep her doors open, since no kids meant that her income was suddenly reduced to £0. Christina and I decided however that so long as our employment situation didn't change, we would continue to pay her as if Anna was in full attendance as usual.

Fear

The worst part of this though — at least for me — as been the looming fear. Yes the odds of death are low, but they're still very high compared to almost anything you would choose to do on a daily basis. On top of that, the long-term health effects of COVID-19 are almost entirely unknown. There are reports of cramps and migraines lasting months, and permanent heart damage, so this isn't something anyone wants to get.

My parents are both very high-risk, and yet they continue to have regular visits with my brother who flies all over Canada for work. It doesn't help that my brother's attitude toward COVID is more dismissive than anything else.

Personally I've had breathing concerns for years ever since I contracted pertussis in my late teens. Every time I've had a bad flu since then, there have been moments where the coughing and seizing locks up my whole respiratory system and I literally can't breathe. In those moments, I'm taken back to that year where whooping cough was destroying my lungs and I think that maybe this time will be the last... and then it subsides.

...and that's the flu.

I may talk a big game about the macro-level implications of this thing, but I'm honestly — personally — worried.

Christina is less concerned (which doesn't help with my own fears). She's frustrated by the way this year has likely stunted Anna's social development, how we see our friends so rarely (always outside, at a "safe" social distance), and she remains (rightly) concerned about the way the vaccines have been rushed through, and how public health is once again being politicised: you're either happy to give your 2 year-old a vaccine that's never been tested on 2-year-olds being rolled out by a government with a demonstrated lack of interest in public health, or you're an idiot anti-vaxxer who hates Britian.

There's a lot of stress to go around.

Goodbye Workfinder, Hello MoneyMover (again)

On the corporate front, I said goodbye to Founders4Schools/Workfinder back in November, and while I'll miss a lot of the people there, I won't miss working there for a variety of reasons.

For the last 2 months of 2020, I went back to MoneyMover to help move some of their codebase forward. I'd been helping to keep things running in my off-hours for the last 2 years, but there were a lot of things that needed more dedicated attention, so I agreed to come back for a short stint to help out. It's a great place to work, so I've really enjoyed being able to work with with everyone again.

Later this month, I'll be moving onto my next full-time job, this time with LimeJump. That move warrants an entirely separate post though, so I hope to get to that soon.

Majel

Finally, the best news (for me anyway) this year was the "launching" of my latest side project, Majel. I won't be announcing it to the nerd world for a few days still, but I'm really happy with how it's turned out.

Majel is a front-end for Mycroft, an OpenSource Alexa replacement. Imagine being able to "install" Alexa on your laptop or a Raspberry Pi and know that it does what you want without eavesdropping on your conversations. Mycroft even sells dedicated devices that do the same thing (just like an Echo), again, all Freely licensed so you can extend it in any way you like.

Majel is one such extension, my add-on to the Mycroft system that allows you to control a web browser with voice commands. Sure, maybe Alexa can control a "smart" TV and play shows from Amazon Prime, but it's unlikely that Amazon will also let Alexa control Netflix, let alone a local library stored in something like Kodi.

So I wrote Majel to do just that. You can say stuff like:

Play The West Wing

and it'll look at your local library and play those files if you have them (remembering where you left off of course). If you don't have them, it'll ask Netflix & Amazon who has the show and then play it with the service that does.

It also does stuff like:

Youtube baby shark

Where it'll look up "baby shark" on Youtube and play the first search result, full-screen and on a loop. Anna was thrilled.

Finally, it plugs into my Firefox bookmarks to do handy things like:

Search my bookmarks for chicken

Where it'll draw up a touch-friendly web page full of chicken recipes from my curated collection.

It's all licensed under the AGPL and regardless of whether or not there's much interest in it, I'll likely continue to develop on it. I want to be able to tell it to do basic web stuff, like do a Google/DuckDuckGo search for something or pull up a Wikipedia page on an arbitrary topic. I also want to get it to a point where I can say:

Call the parents

and have it start a video call, but that'll likely require working with something like PyGUI, so it may be a while before I can figure that out.

Anyway, I'm really happy with it, and it represents the culmination of roughly a year's work, squeezed into my off hours after Anna's gone to bed and when I'm not already expected to do some off-hours contracting. I'm hoping it'll show the Mycroft project a way toward making these digital assistants a more visual experience, but even if it flops, I'm still happy to have it running on my old Surface Pro 3 in the kitchen.

September 05, 2016 11:39 +0000  |  Employment Job Hunting 3

I suppose you could say that the process started years ago when I mused about applying to Mozilla. I was living in Amsterdam at that point and wanted a job where I could go into the office and have lunch with coworkers etc. so despite Andy's encouragement, I decided not to apply for a developer position there.

Years later another position opened up just as I was about to move to London, so I applied, got through a few rounds of interviews and then the position evaporated, changing to a junior-level role instead.

Later still another job opened for a developer tools role. I applied to that and ran aground on their new "HackerRank" coding test. These tests are terrible, but that's a rant for another time. Regardless, I bombed out on that application too.

Then a few months ago, Stephanie sent me a message telling me that her team had an opening for a senior Python developer. I applied not long after the role appeared on the site, along with Stephanie's recommendation. This time, I've managed to graduate past the terrible HackerRank test, and through all four rounds of interviews.

As I understand it, the verdict is supposed to come down tomorrow and I'm facing off against two other potentials. The anxiety around this whole thing is surprisingly crippling: this isn't just a job, it's Mozilla, the Good guys, a big important company that's on the front lines in the fight for the Open Web. I don't think I've ever wanted any job more than I want this one.

It's a long weekend in Canada & the US, so they won't be getting back to me 'till Tuesday, which means sometime between 8pm and 5am London time. I may not know anything until I wake up and check my phone on Wednesday morning. That's my last day at my current job (Cyan) for this week, since I took two days off to pack for our move to Cambridge, so this Wednesday is going to be messy, regardless of the Mozilla decision.

Update

Well I didn't get it. The main guy over there had some very nice things to say about me in the "we don't want you" email, but the reality is that I will not be working for the Good Guys this time around either :-(

March 04, 2015 13:58 +0000  |  Employment Ripe NCC 0

My boss just sent this to me:

[List of Employee names and Me],

As agreed verbally, I'm requesting you to work on the weekend of 28-29 March, in order to attend the RIPE Atlas Hackaton. Your attendance at the evening socials is optional (and not recognised as extra hours).

According to the HR policy [link to policy on our intranet], you're entitled to compensation for this. Please let HR know if you prefer monetary or VAC days.

Cheers, [Boss' Name]

"Welcome to Europe" he said jokingly.

I just wanted to post this to stand in sharp contrast to how companies tend to work in Canada, ie:

You're working this weekend. No we're not paying you for it. If you're not ok with this, you're replaceable.

Back home, there's a lot of talk about "Work/life balance", but employers here actually understand what that means and practise it.

January 22, 2014 17:46 +0000  |  Employment Software Web Development 0

Every once in a while I hear people speaking with authority about what exactly agile software development is, and the funny thing is, they usually conflict with other statements with similar authority about agile. Often, this is coupled with negative comments about how agile is impractical because X, which is frustrating, because some of my most productive years were spent in a fully agile office environment.

So I thought that I'd write something about agile as well, if for no other reason than to hopefully point people in the direction of what I know to be a very efficient and practical means of getting stuff done. I don't want to claim that this is the One True Way of agile development though, as I'm not interested in having the kind of conversation where we re-classify everything for the sake of giving it a name. My team lead at the time, Mike Gauthier called this system agile, and that's good enough for me.

Talk Less, Code More

The goal behind agile is to have developers spend time doing what they love: rolling code, and to keep them out of meetings they want no part of to begin with. Instead developers have only 3 responsibilities over and above writing code throughout the sprint. I'll cover these in more detail below:

  • A Morning stand up meeting: Every day, 10min
  • Sprint meeting: 1hr
    • 30min to recap the last sprint
    • 30min to prepare the next one
  • Any additional initiative taken to talk to the client about what they want

Note what isn't in that list:

  • Requirements meetings
  • Proposals
  • Logging hours
  • Documentation

The idea behind agile is essentially: "Here's a task, go!". The key to making this work is to keep the tasks simple and concise, so that the result of the sprint is incremental. Read: easy to deploy, with no surprises.

The rapid pace of an agile project means that the usual slow processes of planning meetings and wiki documentation becomes an exercise in futility: the job is done before it's planned, and it's changed not long after it's documented.

Stand Up

It sounds like a pointless process, but it's probably the most powerful part of an agile system. The morning "stand up" meeting, or "scrum" is exactly what it sounds like: the entire team stands up in a corner of the room to answer 3 questions each:

  1. What'd you do yesterday?
  2. What're you expecting to do today?
  3. What happened yesterday that prevented you from doing what you needed to do?

Each developer should talk for no more than a few minutes, answering these questions point blank. It's the opportunity for the team lead to address whatever problems were mentioned (after the meeting), and for other developers to find out that their colleagues are waiting for them to finish something.

Note that this meeting is not for design discussions, or gripes etc. Rather, the purpose is to be a quick update on what's going on -- which is why you're supposed to stand up through the whole thing. The minute someone starts to look like they need to sit, that's your cue that the meeting has gone on too long.

Sprints

Think of sprints as a deploy schedule, but short and seemingly insignificant in what they produce. While a typical software deploy schedule may last months or even years, consisting of massive upgrade paths and a long complex list of changes, sprints are typically 1-2 weeks long. You write the code, and it's live in a few days.

The big difference from other methods is that sprints are incremental, so while new features roll out bit by bit, bugs are fixed weekly with no having to maintain multiple branches for extended intervals.

Keeping the sprint short ensures 4 things:

  • The tasks are always short-term and easy to comprehend both for developers and clients
  • Clients see progress on a regular, predictable schedule
  • Releases are predictable, and easy to break new features into
  • Your team has a concrete and easy to understand goal to work toward

Code Debt

But what about those elaborate project charts with tasks designated to different developers, all colour coded by week, accounting for availability?

Gone. All of it. Throw it out. You now have a binder full of post-its, or if you're feeling all 21st century about it, a Jira task list. This bundle of tasks is your code debt and should not be organised as priorities are expected to change from sprint to sprint. At most the PM should keep a loose tally of priorities, so as to make the sprint planning meetings go smoother.

Chipping Away at that Debt

At the start of every sprint, you hold a meeting in which the project manager talks to the developers about what's most pressing in terms of bug fixes and new features. Importantly, this is a two-way conversation: the PM representing the needs of the client, and the developers representing their own limitations and the quality/maintainability of the code.

This sprint planning meeting is where you take stuff out of your code debt, break it into bite-sized chunks, and assign it to the current sprint. You need to keep the tasks small and easy to achieve in < 4hours. If it takes longer than that, it needs to be broken down. This has a couple big benefits:

  • Big jobs can be spread around, potentially finishing them faster
  • Knowledge sharing is easier as everyone has the opportunity to work on smaller portions of a greater whole.
  • It's an easy way to make big jobs suddenly feel possible.
  • Finishing a task results in a sense of accomplishment for the developers
  • Incremental change gives the client a sense that something is being done

No Ticket, No Work

Now that your sprint planning meeting has broken up a portion of your code debt into tasks, the team is presented with a white board with a simple grid layout:

+--------+--------------+-----------+------------+---------------+
|  Todo  |  Developers  |  Working  |  Finished  |  QA Complete  |
+--------+--------------+-----------+------------+---------------+
|        |  Daniel      |           |            |               |
|        +--------------+-----------+------------+---------------+
|        |  Aileen      |           |            |               |
|        +--------------+-----------+------------+---------------+
|        |  Charlie     |           |            |               |
|        +--------------+-----------+------------+---------------+
|        |  Aisha       |           |            |               |
+--------+--------------+-----------+------------+---------------+

That Todo column is where you put the amorphus blob of post-it notes, each one representing one of the aforementioned bite-sized tasks for this sprint. Note that while in this column, they aren't actually assigned to anyone; they're simply waiting for someone to take them and stick it onto their Working column.

Now, say that there are 30 tasks to complete before the end of the sprint. Aileen sits down at her desk and as she has nothing to do yet, she looks at the board and grabs the post-it about fixing a bug in email notifications. She moves the post-it from the Todo column into the Working column on her row, and opens her editor.

When the job's done, she moves it to Finished, at which point the QA team can now take a look, and when they're happy with the job, they move it to QA Complete. If however her change broke something, or if it's simply unsatisfactory, they move the post-it all the way back to the Todo column, where Charlie might grab it later that day, since Aileen has moved onto another ticket about the statistics engine.

In practise, developers will often gravitate toward tasks they're familiar with, and they'll often leave tickets that have been bounced-back by QA for the initial developer and this can be ok. However if ever one developer becomes a dominant force on a particular component, (s)he might be forbidden from working on it for a while, to make sure that the other developers have a chance to spend some time learning how that software works.

The most important part of this is that developers aren't supposed to do any work unless there's a ticket for them. This keeps people on-task toward completing the sprint on-time and as expected. If there's other work that deserves attention, this is best brought up at the next sprint planning meeting.

Spikes

It's about at this point where people start with comments like "What if the server goes down? Are we expected to wait until the next sprint to fix it?". Obviously not. Emergencies or "directives from on high" are things that can't wait and by their nature they can't be part of the sprint plan. They're also rare, so breaking a working system to accommodate them is a little absurd.

The solution is what's called a "spike". A task injected into the Todo list, typically flagged to be done as soon as possible. Its presence in a sprint taints the sprint, so that it can be pointed to in the event of an overrun:

The server went down on Friday and Aisha had to burn half her day fixing it. As a result, we only finished 33 of our 36 tickets this sprint.

This is the sort of thing talked about in the post-sprint meeting, and if more action is needed (either to fully correct the problem or to avoid future cases) these tasks are added to the next sprint.

So, How'd it Go?

There's one other meeting of consequence. At the end of every sprint, you meet to talk about how the sprint fared: what went well, what didn't. In those 30 minutes, you talk about how awesome the QA team was, and how much it sucked when that module we thought would save us work turned out to create more than it solved. It's important to use this time to blow off steam and celebrate the accomplishments of the previous sprint and to take some time to figure out what could have gone better. It facilitates knowledge sharing more than anything else, and allows the PM and team lead to make better decisions in the future.

Documentation

The one thing people freak out about most when I talk about this method is the lack of documentation. They conjure up nightmare scenarios where one of the developers is hit by a bus and "no one knows how their stuff works", or point out that new developers won't have anywhere to start. Both of these are non-issues though, so long as you stick to the process and don't write terrible code.

If any member of the team doesn't know how a component works enough to get in there and complete a task, then it's time to get that person working on one of those tasks. Knowledge transfer happens best through doing, which means making sure that every member of the team has her fingerprints on every part. To put it in real terms, if Daniel gets hit by a bus, the project can go on because Aileen, Charlie, and Aisha have all spent some time poking at the payment engine. Not one of them wrote the whole thing, but the understanding is there.

Of course this can only happen if the code is readable and adheres to established standards. Variable names should be in the common language of the team and be whole words, method calls should be given names that explain what they do, and class names should make sense as singular objects. If the code can't be understood by someone who's never seen it before, then it's broken by design. Making sure that everyone has an opportunity to interact with this code is the best way to ensure it's readability.

Be Rigid

Probably the hardest part of agile software development is sticking to the process. As simple as it is, it's just too easy to fix a bug that someone found that isn't in the sprint, or add a simple feature that the client mentioned earlier that day. If agile is going to work, this can't be allowed to happen, and a lot of people have a hard time with this.

What you have to remember is that while the process feels pointlessly rigid, it's there to protect the team and ensure that the client gets exactly what was promised on the schedule that was promised. Adding in bug fixes can potentially derail the schedule, or introduce bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place. It teaches the client that she can have whatever she wants whenever she wants, and as it's not part of the agreed sprint, she may try to get away with not paying for it.

From the developer side, it's important to remember that we like lists. If we can look at the list of stuff to do and know that that's all that's ever going to be there for the whole sprint, this introduces a sense of calm, and knowing exactly what's expected.

To this end, it's important to reward a team that manages to complete its sprint ahead of schedule. If they get everything finished by Thursday, let them take Friday off. The project is exactly as far along as you expected, so why not? Similarly, if the team is routinely late in completing the sprint, overtime is justified since the entire team helped write the sprint schedule during the planning meeting.

Conclusions

What makes agile work is having a simple and concise plan to follow, that has been agreed upon by all parties. I've worked at companies that implement this system without involving the developers so the schedule is imposed by people who have no knowledge of what actually needs to be done. I've also worked at companies where the developers run the schedule, which is to say, there's barely any schedule at all and the results are products that "mostly work", according to whatever the developer at the time thought was appropriate. As with so many other things, the key is openness, honesty, and inclusion in the process for all sides.

Agile is a system that everyone understands and agrees to, but doesn't get in the way of actually getting stuff done. It protects all parties involved from undue stress, and unexpected results, and I can honestly say that it was (at least for me) the best system to work with.

September 21, 2013 00:08 +0000  |  Employment Netherlands 0

In Canada, we essentially have two systems that manage the relationship between employer and employee: unionised and exploitative. Both of these options suck and for different reasons.

  • Unions tend to foster a combative relationship with management and often result in both sides making unreasonable demands of the other. Strikes and lockouts are common, as are attempts to undermine the right of workers to organise, union-busting, etc.

  • Non-unionised workplaces are all-too-often exploitative, using the threat of being replaced to push employees into working additional hours for free, taking pay-cuts, or even breaking the law. Conditions are often unsafe, and the atmosphere filled with distrust and animosity.

In a lot of European countries however, a third-way has been adopted, so much so that when I talk about the concept of labour unions with other Europeans, many of them don't understand the purpose of such a system.

So, what the heck is an OR? It's the Dutch incarnation of this third-way, a staff-elected council that represents employees in dealings with management. Far from being a token voice, their position has legal standing to the point where many key decisions: office hours, pension, health insurance, require approval from the OR.

The relationship between management and the OR is typically more amicable than the one you usually see between a labour unions and management in large part because the staff have more options available to them than work stoppage. The council is kept small, and is composed of people from the company, rather than an external body like a union. This means that the people you're arguing with are the same people you might eat lunch with. The same goes for the people you represent.

The meeting minutes are distributed to all staff by email, and elections are held every few years. The number of members is dictated by the total number of employees in the company, and anyone who has been with the company for six months or more may stand for election.

OR's are legally required of any company that exceeds 80 employees.

I tell you first-hand that this is the way to manage the relationship between employer and employee. It's not perfect, but I've never seen a more functional relationship in an office environment... and that's after working with ten companies over 14years in 4 different cities in 2 countries.

February 11, 2011 22:19 +0000  |  Amsterdam Employment Job Hunting Moving Netherlands Unemployment 6

For those of you who follow my life on Twitter or Facebook, I apologise for taking so long to post the details of the recent changes to my employment status. Stuff's been kinda crazy these past few weeks, so I've had other priorities that I'll talk about in other posts.

So here's the full story: On January 18th, I responded to a job ad for a web developer at MarketSims that I found on an online job posting board, possibly monster, but frankly, I don't remember. The application included my usual fun-sounding cover letter and a PDF copy of my CV along with a link to this site.

That same night, I received a response asking about my preferences for CMSs and/or frameworks and we had some good dialogue about why one CMS might be chosen over another, and why I prefer frameworks in general etc. etc. We also talked about my salary expectations, volunteer work, and outside interests as well, all over email. He thanked me for the info and said he'd get back to me.

Then he got sick for about a week so I didn't hear from him for a while. When we reconnected on the 31st, we talked about doing a Skype interview and settled on a midnight gig on the evening of the 4th.

The interview was with the CEO, CTO, and COO and covered in greater detail what they're looking for. Basically, they're looking to unify the many sites they have into a single managed solution as well as build a portal site for people in their industry. We talked about options and preferences and I made no secret regarding my preferences for Python/Django -- something I was happy to hear was positively received. The interview was largely non-technical, and when it was finished, the CEO said that they'd like to talk about me privately for a while and get back to me... in about 20minutes. A little surprised, I said thank you and we ended the call.

About 15minutes later, the CTO called me back and offered me the job. I'll start March 1st.

The pay sounds good, though it's tough to tell when you don't really know the cost of living over there. Regardless, it works out to a lot of money in Canada, so that doesn't suck. There's lots of vacation time, as European standards more or less require it, and they're accessible by transit. The CTO may even be able to hook me up with some inexpensive temporary housing with some friends while I look for a place of my own once I know the neighbourhoods better.

All-in-all, things are looking pretty good, though I try not to get too excited. Contracts etc. don't get signed until I come in for my first day and somehow, all of this doesn't feel like it will be "real" until then. I'm definitely leaving though. I've already bought my flights:

Vancouver » Kelowna Feb 21
Kelowna » Vancouver Feb 23
Vancouver » Amsterdam Feb 23

If the temporary housing doesn't work out, I'll look into Couch Surfing, then hostels, then hotels, in that order. Obviously, that's a rough route to take, but I'm not sure how else to do it. I will however endeavour to blog the process, if for no other reason to chronicle how very painful this kind of thing is.