I don't know if most people can understand how happy these poll results make me.

@mayintoronto one of my favorite things about working in the software side of an eat-our-own-dogfood research institution's archive is our teams tend to include embedded scientist-users, so they are part of our everyday process. And for the projects without them, we still have easy access to just ask them things.

Voilà une fois installées

@mayintoronto What if my users are the software developers? 😅

Remember that weird ass Politico poll last week asking folks what they thought about just throwing Black folks' votes under a bus?

A piece of anecdata:

Political consultant: [sharing tea after our zoom ended] So I was in a meeting last week and I need help processing it.
Me: I'm here.

Her: DNC consultants are telling candidates to avoid talking about Black voters having their representation snatched away.
Me: Shut the fuck up.

Her: Yep. The Dems only want folks to talk about the price of gas and affordability.
Me: Those fuckers. They don't want to win ever again, do they?

Her: Nope. I pressed the consultant. Maybe that's a bad strategy, maybe that's not the way to go. And you know what he said?
Me: What?

Her: He said, Look at me. Look at my billables. I'm doing fine.
Me: ASSHOLES.

That's the party, y'all.
That's the Blue Wave that's supposed to save us.

That poll doesnt look so weird now. It looks like a fucking test balloon.

@mayintoronto @PapyrusBrigade That's what I voted for! 🤣

[edit] As shocking as it may seem to us, there are people who have not seen Office Space yet.

The best part about polls is the conversations that they inspire.

Hey software developers, have you ever talked to a customer (and/or users of your software?)

#poll #software

@mayintoronto luckily we meet with clients once every fortnight and often prep with them to present outside to others (this is data science though)

The Ashbridges sewage treatment plant has provided this informational pamphlet explaining what can cause smells and how their "odour control system" works. Graphic design is not necessarily their passion. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2026/cc/bgrd/backgroundfile-287113.pdf

@mayintoronto Sadly, I had to answer this in terms of what actually happens, rather than what I wish would happen. I'd really love to get user feedback way more frequently (and with more detail and depth) than I actually do. I hate being siloed away from users.

I love seeing folk in the DDD community showing up in support of that post — because DDD is one of the design approaches that really embraces this movement across design spaces, allowing design of the system-in-context to influence and be influenced by the internal design (aot — like? like events are signals and we’re interested in events in the world and how they influence system behavior, etc.)

@mayintoronto One example: we had a 3-tier system with database, app servers and desktop clients. Added newer faster app servers after 3 year lease period but kept the old slow ones. Users figured out the IDs and would log out if they got dealt an old system, log back in until they got the newer faster service. They knew how long the hourglass showed (German phrase: sandclock). :)

@mayintoronto Dig. I'd set up an always-on zoom and pay a customer to be "in the room" for half a day every day. Of course, I want the *team* to be "in the room" most of the day.

I emphasize over and over to people the extreme power of the Haykumeer Protocol:

"Hey. Come here."

(From a followers-only subthread. Response to an example of a way Google got worse since I ditched it a year ago.)

@mayintoronto And also, you’ll be tempted to use your own tech when a different tech would be better (*cough* using a data streaming tech when a database matched the access patterns much better *cough*). And when you have a problem, you have easy access to the foremost technical experts without wondering if this will be covered by your support plan

@mayintoronto I write software for dentists, and my dentist uses it, so twice a year ;)

@mayintoronto Next to System Metaphor, which no one could quite figure out, and Sustainable Pace, which no employer could ever figure out, Onsite Customer is the most unused of all the original Extreme Programming practices.

I coached dozens of teams for over 25 years. I saw it twice. It worked, of course, *stunningly* well.

@mayintoronto I wonder if it will be skewed by places that “eat their own dog food”. I’ve worked for a company that used its own product to build its infrastructure, so many fellow devs were “customers”. Similarly, I’ve worked on teams building tools for internal use

@mayintoronto I was just thinking about that.

"I talk to the customers, so the engineers don't have to!"