Software Crafts Podcast

Mathias Verraes is the guest of this episode, and for the first time, we have more than one heuristic! Mathias brings three Loss Aversion heuristics from his personal repository. When we make decisions, we often do not explore options that have a risk of loss, even if that loss is balanced out by potential gains. These heuristics help you overcome that bias. We jump right into the rabbit hole, and Mathias brings the intersection of software engineering, psychology, and anthropology to exemplify the heuristics. During the interview, he shares techniques and practices that are part of his toolbox when working on software strategy and design.

Mathias recommends:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
• You Are Not So Smart - https://youarenotsosmart.com/
• The “It's Just Like...” Heuristic - https://verraes.net/2021/05/its-just-like-heuristic/
• Exaptation & managed serendipity - https://thecynefin.co/exaptation-managed-serendipity-part-i/
• Domain-Driven Design Europe conference - https://dddeurope.com/

Mathias Verraes (@mathiasverraes) is the founder and consultant at Aardling and organiser of the Domain-Driven Design Europe conference.

We are back with a new episode featuring Emily Bache. We start with a heuristic close to her work, “Working software is not enough, we need well-crafted software”. Emily shares her view on how code quality is essential, not only for the code maintainability but also to onboard new people on the team, increasing productivity. The interview flows towards team culture and management; she shares her experiences about how friction can arise in a team that produces software with no shared values and rituals that trickle down to code. She explains how all of those decisions and misalignments contribute to the complexity of the codebase.

Emily recommends the following resources:

• Samman Technical Coaching - https://sammancoaching.org/
• Approval Tests - https://approvaltests.com/
• Text Test - https://www.texttest.org/
• Dig Deep Roots Newsletter - https://www.digdeeproots.com/articles/on/legacy/

Emily (@emilybache) is a Technical Agile Coach with ProAgile. She is the author of "Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman method", a maintainer of Gilded Rose Refactoring Kata and other exercises and a frequent conference speaker.

In this episode, Anand Safi is our guest. Anand is challenged with the “Most Valuable First” pattern from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). He starts to analyse value based on the different zoom levels: organisation, team and individuals. Anand explains the high degree of variance that the concept of value has. We end up discussing feedback cycles, psychology safety and OKR’s frameworks, and how all of it is connected.

Anand suggests to follow:

• Marty Cagan
• Esther Derby
• Simon Sinek

Anand (@anandsafi) is an Engineering Leader for Mark43 - a public safety software company. Over the past decade, Anand has progressed from starting as an aspiring engineer to becoming an engineering leader.

Anand also is a Startup Advisor, Volunteer Board Member and an established tech mentor/ coach outside of his role. He loves reading about engineering culture, team dynamics and new advancements in tech.

Jason Rosoff is the guest of this episode. We start the interview with the pattern “Personalized relationships for co-creation” from the Cloud Native Transformations repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/personalized-relationships-for-co-creation). Jason explains the difference between a complex and complicated problem and how psychological safety plays an essential role in innovation. He shares some examples of how some companies constraint the physical environment of their offices to create space for people to talk and share their ideas. During the interview, Jason explains how relationships can play an essential role for information to travel across a network, how organisations can enable it, and how managers and executives can read weak signals latent in their organisations.

Jason recommends the following resources:

• Radical Candor from Kim Scott
• Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter from Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown
• “You are not so smart” podcast (https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/) 

Jason Rosoff (@jasonrr) has a passion for building products and teams that scale. He believes teaching people to be better leaders is at the core of building anything great. As co-founder and CEO of Radical Candor, LLC, Jason helps teams at companies large and small build the best relationships of their careers and achieve amazing results.

Prior to Radical Candor, Jason spent seven years scaling Khan Academy from four people to hundreds as both chief people officer and chief product officer. Working in partnership with The Gates Foundation and Google, he helped Khan Academy improve educational outcomes for more than 100-million students and teachers worldwide.

Previously, Jason was a product leader at Fog Creek where he helped build the teams that created StackOverflow and Trello. Early in his career, Jason led engineering operations at a white-label producer of photo books for Apple. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in management from New York University.

Today, our guest is Liz Keogh. She is challenged with the heuristic “Ongoing Education‘ from the Cloud Native Patterns repository (https://www.cnpatterns.org/organization-culture/ongoing-education). We discuss the learning at the individual, team and organisation levels. As the interview unfolds, Liz links Cynefin domains to the different learning styles, as well as BDD. In her words, BDD is all itself about learning!

Liz recommends:

• Wardley Maps (https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-being-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec) by Simon Wardley
• Crossing the river by feeling the stones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW9L1uNMCs) by Simon Wardley
• Commitment: Novel about Managing Project Risk by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts and Chris Geray
• Cynefin for everyone by Liz Keogh (https://lizkeogh.com/cynefin-for-everyone/)

Liz Keogh (@lunivore) is a Lean, Agile and Cynefin consultant. She has roots in the BDD community, and she told us, she will be back to development work.

In this episode, we host Andrea Goulet, and she brings her own heuristic: “Empathy system architecture”. She has been doing research about empathy within the software industry, and the results are amazing. We discuss the implications of empathy both at the individual level, as well as, group level. Last but not the least, we discuss one of her passions, legacy systems and the hidden communication artifacts with it!

Andrea recommends:

• Practical Empathy, For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work by Indi Young   
• The War For Kindness, Building Empathy In A Fractured World by Jamil Zaki
• Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design by Cyrille Martraire

Andrea Goulet (@andreagoulet) is a sought-after keynote speaker for conferences around the world, empowering audiences to deepen their technical skills for understanding and communicating with others. She is best known for her work defining Empathy-Driven Development, a framework that helps software engineers anchor their decisions and deliverables on the perspectives of the people who will be impacted by what they create. Andrea is a co-founder of Corgibytes, a software consultancy that helps organizations pay down technical debt and modernize legacy systems. You can recognize her by the JavaScript tattoo on her wrist and learn more about her work at https://empathyintech.com.

Dragan Stepanović is our guest, and he brings his heuristic: “Continuous code reviews enable higher team's throughput”. We dive into Dragan’s research on how async code reviews affect the quality and throughput of teams that create and maintain software. He also shares how his research challenged some of his assumptions, and we finalise discussing his experiences bringing his research to management.

Dragan recommends the following resources:

• The Principles of Product Development Flow from Donald G. Reinertsen
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win from Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford
• The Goal from Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation from Jez Humble and Dave Farley
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations from Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

Dragan (@d_stepanovic) is based in Berlin and currently works as a principal engineer at HelloFresh. Typically on the search for better ways of working, exploring ends of the spectrums, and helping teams and organisations try out counter-intuitive ideas that initially don't make a lot of sense but end up as completely opposite of that.

It's been a long time since he fell in love with eXtreme Programming, Domain-Driven Design, and software as a craft (founder of Software Crafting Serbia community). In the last couple of years, he enjoys endless discussions connecting the Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, Lean and socio-technical topics.

Today we host Johanna Rothman, and she is challenged with the heuristic “Get the team in a rhythm” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/team-rhythm/). She starts explaining how the team rhythm and feedback cycles are connected and can strengthen each other. We discuss the role of a manager, and also how the managers should operate as a team, rather than be an extension of a team. Last but not the least, she shares her experiences with agile leadership, where it is necessary to move between discovery and delivery modes. And she left us with a heuristic, “Prune the decision tree”. Johanna recommends:

• Multiple shot feedback loops support innovation: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/12/multiple-short-feedback-loops-support-innovation/
• The pretty link for all three Modern Management Made Easy books: https://www.jrothman.com/mmme
• The hiring book: https://www.jrothman.com/hiring
• Multiple short feedback loops support innovation: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2020/12/multiple-short-feedback-loops-support-innovation/
• Some posts on management cohorts:
• https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2021/03/management-peer-cohort-vs-team-pairing-and-mobbing/
• https://www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/2021/01/create-your-peer-management-team-for-fun-and-profit-and-to-solve-problems/

Johanna Rothman (@johannarothman), known as the “Pragmatic Manager”, offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humour, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, and Create Your Successful Agile Project. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

Monarch Wadia is our guest, and he is challenged with the heuristic “Master your tools” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/master-your-tools/). Monarch gives a different perspective to master the tools, which stems from his experience as a Bootcamp organiser. We discuss the differences between colleague and Bootcamp education and how the education paradigm shifts, at least with our industry. It was the start to go down the rabbit hole on how technology influences our culture and how we, humans, are changing our interaction patterns.

Monarch goes off script and recommends that we should decondition rather than discuss what we already know. 

Monarch Wadia (@monarchwadia) proudly identifies as a self-taught developer. He sees software programming as a democratic industry that welcomes everyone who seeks to enter it with open arms, provided they're willing to put in the hard work needed to learn the ropes.

He has led teams of more than 100 software engineers as a software architect, is the founder of two startups, and has nearly 10 years of experience in the industry. As Mintbean's CEO, he enjoys creating mentorship and career opportunities for newer web developers.

In this episode, Julie Lerman is our guest, and she is challenged with the pattern “Conserve familiarity” from the Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns repository (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf). Throughout her career, Julie uses this pattern to be an enabler for conversations with people who use the systems. The talks are crucial to understanding the needs of people and how they use software that might be considered legacy but has a purpose. She shares her field stories, where Julie describes the patterns and techniques to maintain software that is expected to have a long lifetime.

Julie suggests the following resources:

• You are the most important resource!
• Domain-Driven Design books
• Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals course by Julie Lerman and Steve Smith (https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/domain-driven-design-fundamentals) 
• Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns (http://scg.unibe.ch/download/oorp/OORP.pdf) 

Julie Lerman (@julielerman) is a Microsoft Regional Director, Docker Captain and a long-time Microsoft MVP who now counts her years as a coder in decades.  She makes her living as a coach and consultant to software teams around the world. You can find Julie presenting on Entity Framework, Domain Driven Design and other topics at user groups and conferences around the world. Julie blogs at https://thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and popular videos on Pluralsight.com.