http://me.veekun.com/blog/2011/12/04/fuck-passwords/

If you feel like me, go and have a read. I’m pretty sure it will cheer you up.

A little lightbulb went on recently as I read “Let my People Go Surfing”, by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia. Patagonia was founded by a group of friends who were social misfits: “dirtbag” climbers and surfers who only worked in order to save cash for their adventures. When they came to work, they wanted to enjoy it:

I wanted to have a company where people came to work on the balls of their feet, taking the stairs two at a time.

Yvon describes in the book how they’ve worked hard to keep this culture alive at Patagonia. Increasingly over, the years, I’ve prioritised enjoying my work over how much I can earn from it, and I believe that this search for joy is a fundamental part of my model of craftsmanship. When I haven’t enjoyed a job, either I’ve worked with people to change things so that I do, or I’ve left. I think it’s impossible to truly craft something when you’re working in an unpleasant environment with people you whose company you don’t enjoy. On the other hand, when I’ve had the privilege to work with great people using great tools, I feel like nothing can stop me.

So for me, craftsmanship is about finding joy in your work. Here’s Brian Marick on Joy:

Now, I could say that a joyful employee is a productive employee, and that lack of joy on a project is like a canary keeling over in a coal mine: a sign that something big is wrong and you better pay attention. Maybe that’s true. I’d certainly like to believe it. But, fundamentally, I don’t care. I think joy is its own excuse. We deserve it. More to the point, those people around us deserve it.

An idle mind is a questioning, sceptical mind. Hence it is a mind not too bound up with ephemeral things, as the minds of workers are. The idler, then, is somebody who separates himself from his occupation: there are many people scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.

– Robert Luis Stevenson

Second, though, is that I have well and truly caught the twitter bug. If you haven’t tried it yet, I really suggest you give it a go. It’s a great way to engage in conversations, and it somehow breaks down barriers very effectively, possibly better than any electronic medium I’ve played with yet.

See you over there? http://twitter.com/mattwynne

What can you do?

• Sign the petition
• Visit the campaign website
• Come to Extreme Tuesday Club’s next meeting to find out more.

The bad news is that it looks as if my present client may be running out of interesting work for me to do, for the time being, which is a real shame as I’m greatly enjoying working there.

The good news though is that this means I’m now available for hire again! If you need an experienced, charismatic programmer, technical architect or coach to join or lead a team of programmers, and you’re serious about that team producing high-quality code that delivers maximum value to its users and enjoying it as they do so, then I think it’s time we had a little chat.

Read more here: http://mattwynne.net/work/cv/programmer/

The sessions are longer than at other conferences I’ve been to, which allows for more depth. I’ve been to three today: – Code Debt (Workshop) – Is Software Practice Advancing? (Panel Discussion) – Real Options (Workshop)

The evening is ensuing with more BoF sessions, so there’s no rest!

Code Debt

The Code Debt session was an excellent workshop run by Peter Marks and David Harvey, focussing on techniques for teaching teams to recognise compromises in code quality.

We played a great exercise with two different code bases which clearly illustrated how much easier it is to change high quality code. I won’t detail it here in case I want to play it with you some day.

We looked at some real code (from some apache buffering thing) and tried to categorise the debts that we saw into – Comprehensibility – Simplicity (lack of baggage) – Conceptual Integrity – Behavioural Integrity

We also worked through a ‘forensic accounting’ audit which looked at how the two codebases we’d used in the first excercise evolved to the state they were in, clearly showing how a series of apparently insignificant design choices quickly combine to leave the code in very different places.

As David pointed out, the ‘debt’ term and metaphor is probably much more powerful than the traditional ‘smell’ in how well it communicates to management types.

We finished in groups, trying to identify the practices that we can use to fight the emergence of these different kinds of debts. They should be documented here eventually.

Real Options

Very good workshop adding more concepts around the deferring of decisions. Read more here

Anyone know what’s going on?

I have a trunk branch and a stable branch. When I want to promote a cut of code from trunk to stable, I use ‘merge’, and for every single file in every single folder that’s been renamed in trunk, I have to fucking well confirm, with three mindless bastard clicks, that I want to use the name/path from trunk.

Do the people who wrote this thing use it themselves? How do they sleep at night?