Don’t send me Easter emails

Ever got the “please don’t send me Father’s Day emails”

I get the sentiment behind emails like this, but it feels like doing it in the moment keeps it raw. Ask just after I sign up if there are any sensitive dates, at the same time as asking me if I celebrate Christian or Muslim holidays. (No, I don’t know any website that does that)

Consent, at least under the GDPR, should be obtained in advance, freely given, and without prejudice. So why do you need to email me to ask if I want no emails? Ask me up front if there are any important dates, any birthdays, and include a list of common ones from the Christian, Sikh, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other calendars. Include dates related to my country. Thanksgiving Day is different for the USA and Canada. And there are a lot of Independence Days.

Sure, folks won’t want to fill it in unless they see a benefit, but that’s what consent is. It’s more work up front and ongoing, but in return, you get trust, a much stronger relationship and the person feels more respected. This is a rare phenomenon in consumer data these days.

Consent matters. Informed consent in advance demonstrates commitment.

#privacy #quality #ux

customer collaboration over contract negotiation;

No great software was written without collaboration. And the best collaboration is always as close to the end user as possible.

But contracts are your safety net, especially in consulting. They’re your agreement up front of “this far, but no further”. Money is the engine of trade, but contracts are the heart of capitalism. They define your scope, your compensation and your boundaries. Without them, the loudest voice will always win.

Contracts protect you, but don’t let them smother you. They’re the foundation and the backstop to the project. They should never be the start of a discussion, but they can be a very useful end to one where customer collaboration becomes scope creep, taking advantage, or communication fails. It protects people from power.

Negotiate your contract carefully, but always start your conversations in the spirit of collaboration.

#agile #software #teams

working software over comprehensive documentation;

Good code documents itself.

But there’s a lot of context outside the code that informs it. There’s architecture and design decisions about which language to use, about whether it’s micro services, monoliths, containers, clouds, or mobile apps.

There’s legal frameworks and security certifications.

Code determines how. Tests determine the what. But documentation tells you why and when. Documentation supports future you or the next team member to understand what the reasoning behind that code was. It gives your present self grace for what you know now and don’t know yet.

Document the requirements in just enough detail, but document the decisions in depth. Working software, that’s suitably readable, is the best way to describe what it does. But understanding how that code came to be has a value you only understand after you forget how it came to be.

Document why you built this, but not that. What was the experiment? What was the context? Is it time to experiment again? Is it time to chalk the experiment up to experience and move on?

Be nice to yourself. Comprehensively document decisions.

#agile #code #software #teams

If it’s hurts, stop doing it : you don’t need to know everything

The best managers are great at delegation.

Micromanagement is exhausting. It’s stressful. And it creates delays and bugs because you become a black hole for ideas and improvements. You end up working longer hours. The job becomes painful.

So save yourself. Teach your team how you want feedback. Teach them what documentation makes sense. Make sure they highlight problems. And I’ll always make sure I’m available to answer questions in the stand-up, but 7 times out of 10, someone else beats me to it.

I don’t know everything, and I shouldn’t. A good manager is a catalyst for communication and generates questions to help. They’ll connect the problems with someone who can resolve them, and save some time to learn about the next problem.

Don’t be a bottleneck. Don’t be a critical path. Be a gardener and help the team grow. If it hurts, you might be strangling the team. Trust them and share the load.

Delegate, but make sure the important knowledge doesn’t go on holiday when your staff do.

#IFTTT #Trello

individuals and interactions over processes and tools;

Good processes and tools support teams. Bad ones destroy them.

Individuals are good, but if you look at the world through a post-meritocracy lens, you understand that individuals aren’t the primary driver of success. Everyone needs to work well and drive the project forward, but everyone also needs to work to move the team forward.

There are plenty of Theory of Constraints examples where individual progress can be at the expense of team progress, because they use their own code style, or they don’t have time to document or coach, or when there’s a queue for testing, and the rockstar developer is too precious to do QA and unblock the release.

Good processes help the team work together. They provide guidelines for the team, like a code of conduct, a standard operating procedure or a definition of done. They describe how things are done here so everyone has a shared expectation and a shared goal. That’s how agile teams become more effective.

Processes serve the people and the interactions, not the other way round, and should be open to extension or modification when they no longer serve them.

Good processes help individuals fall into the pit of success, whether documented or automated. Static code analysis helps every reader and avoids those subtle mistakes. Conventional commits help whoever is tracking down a production issue at 3am.

We don’t want heavyweight processes. We want them small, adjustable and easy to follow. But we want processes that support everyone on the team. Make all meetings online in a hybrid team. Have a set of standard criteria and questions for interviewing potential new team members. Reduce the bus factor with documentation processes so team members can have medical treatment, or visit family abroad for an extended break, or support extended adoption leave for new parents.

Don’t let an individual bend the team. Let the team embrace the individuals. And build whatever minimum process keeps those individuals supported.

#agile #development #teams

Large Language Models and the Chinese Room

It’s very easy to fool humans. We love to fill in gaps.

We see patterns and assume intelligence. We saw regular pulses from stars and called them Little Green Men. We see faces in cars and washing machines. Our brains fill in gaps when our eyes saccade (link to how weird this is).

And when we see a string of text that is coherent and reinforces our bias, we think that what produced it must be intelligent.

The Chinese Room is a thought experiment about artificial intelligence. The set-up is simple. Imagine there is a room with a letterbox and a massive stack of books. A human who does not speak Chinese is put in the room and told that for every Chinese message posted through the letterbox, they look up the symbols in the stack of books, copy out the response symbols, and post them back. Any Chinese speaker posting messages into the box would think they are talking to someone who understands Chinese, but the person in the box is just looking it up.

A large language model works the same way; it breaks the message into tokens, looks up the tokens in its database, and then looks up what the most likely next token will be based on the billions of tokens that were used to train it. And then adds a bit of randomness by sometimes choosing the 2nd or 3rd most likely.

The LLM then posts the response back, and the human outside the box starts to think that the box is intelligent. And some psychologists look at it and say it’s a prediction machine, and so is the human brain, so they’re the same thing.

But it’s not thinking, even if the chat box says it is. It’s not reasoning, even if the model has reasoning in its name. It’s just figuring out the next word. Sometimes it will figure out the next 10 words, like a Chess Grandmaster scanning the future moves, but it’s not got motivation. It’s not got self-reflection. It does not feel pain or remorse; it just keeps playing its own version of Scrabble until it draws a blank or runs out of tiles.

The thinking didn’t happen in the box. It happened in all the brains in all the people who wrote the words to put in the box, and it happens in all the brains posting things into the box, longing for connection or looking for a minion to help them steal the moon.

Humans love to find intelligence and faces in places where they don’t exist, because our brains are wired to find potential mates, friends and foes. A statistical model is none of those.

#ai #artificialintelligence

No one thinks like you

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re the smartest person in the room. You might be the most knowledgeable about your specialist subject, but being a good boolean whisperer does not automatically make you an expert on public transportation, psychology, poverty, history, finance, or any other industry.

I’ve had the privilege of being disabused of that notion very early on in my career, surrounded by statisticians, linguists, psychologists, designers and vets. I do what I do, and let my curiosity take care of the rest.

But there’s a lot of arrogant arseholes in this industry who think they know best. Those who will talk instead of listening, who belittle, interrupt and condescend. They know their domain very well and are quick to criticise others who don’t understand.

But we all have our own models of how the world works, our own coordinates on the axes that describe the world as controlled by us vs controlled by others, whether money or relationships are more important, whether people matter more than animals, whether humanities can survive without science or science without humanities, visual thinkers or verbal thinkers or lingual thinker or kinetic thinkers. We don’t perceive or act in this world in a way quite like anyone else. We all bring unique experiences and perspectives to the table, and we all know something that others can learn from.

So sit and listen in silence. Take in what you can, and when you’re ready, ask questions. Listen to understand, not to respond, not merely to be polite, but because you are interested and you want to learn.

If we could see how others see us? They’re talking. All you need to do is listen.

#codecraft #requirements #teams

Managing across distances

As the government is starting to ease lockdown and put together timescales for allowing a return to the office, I thought it was worth revisiting some of the ideas I discussed in cross-country coding to see what applies to the upcoming hybrid world, where we know we’re capable of working remotely.

Obviously there will be done time to adjust as we inevitably feel with the mental health consequences of the anxiety of returning to the office as well as the adjustments we’ll need to add or undo to deal with family life, all the new pets and babies that have joined since the start of lockdown, and the mental space we’ve held for new hobbies, for home schooling, for the new health rules.

So take this as a waypoint on some future journey.

I’m not qualified to talk about the mental distress or whatever changes you need to accommodate in your life, but I want to think about how your employer and the technology may need to work in this brave new world.

• Face to face matters. If you’ve seen someone out breaks down barriers to talking to them. Video beats phone, in person beats video.
• Trusted insiders are very useful, when there’s multiple offices, or a team you need to check in with that you’re not in all the meetings for. There’s always small things that are missed when you’re just looking through the window.
• Invest in video. It needs to be good quality. Get better broadband. Get better webcams. Get better microphones.
• But try and be asynchronous. As soon as there’s friction to synchronous communication, collaboration plummets.
• Reminder that in open offices, people prefer electronic communication. “The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences”
• Set expectations. Emergent behaviours only happen through observation and feedback, and distance dampens both dramatically

#developer #leadership #Mentor #teams