We’d done the sensible thing and shared the payment code between them — DRY, less surface area for error, obvious call.

Then the larger system needed PostAuth. We updated the code, added a scheduled task to catch anything the non-deterministic bits missed, moved on.

A few months later: why has no money come through on the smaller system?

We’d ported the PostAuth flow across when we updated the shared code. We hadn’t added the scheduled task. The payment provider, chosen for cheap and cheerful rather than reliability, failed silently rather than erroring. The accounting department, running at the same pace as everyone else, hadn’t caught the gap.

Four separate things had to go wrong simultaneously. Any one of them holding would have meant no loss at all.

The client lost money. Not a catastrophic amount, but real money. I braced for the call.

Try and let me know the next time you decide to run a sale.

He already knew the cost. He’d known before the mistake happened.

Ring a bell?

I remember having mixed feelings when coding bootcamps were springing up everywhere. People were paying thousands to go on a six week bootcamp to learn how to code. I was happy that coding was becoming accessible, but I was not happy that people were picking this career path purely as a way of making money.

The same thing had happened in India - the popularity of software engineering had stemmed from the massive amounts of outsourcing that was happening. It was a lucrative career option. There was no love for the job, no curiosity about learning. It was a job.

Trying to hire a software engineer in 2021/2022 was an absolute nightmare. Salaries were skyrocketing and engineers were rare. Good engineers were rarer. The bootcamps were going hell for leather at this time, and then the layoffs hit. Tens of thousands of jobs lost, along with all the new graduates who entered the market. On top of that, add the promise of A.I being able to write code. It can probably write code as well as some of the bootcamp graduates.

There was a time that the majority of software was written by people who loved the work. It was treated more as a craft and we were all figuring out how to do it better. This craft then got commercialised, industrialised.

The focus is now on productivity, and how quickly we can get code out. The love of the work has been lost. Let A.I have that joyless (thankless) job! I (We?) don’t want it.

I’d rather be the last carpenter who still enjoys the job! What about you?

There is a quote by Mario Andretti:

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.

This one clearly embodies the hare, but is it a good attitude to have in all work, or in general life?

We all seem to place so much emphasis on speed, it seems like we are trying race through life. Aren’t we all going to the same place?

I think the quote (of unclear origin)

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together?

is a good comparison of our options, and while it might be nice(r) to go far, I think there is a lot more value in traveling together.

We are born alone, and we die alone. We do not have choice in those, but why do so many of us go alone, just to go fast?

Truth be told - it also very nearly killed me! I had a breakdown which left me an emotional and mental wreck, as if I’d been hit by a bus (10 points if you tell me which one!)

It has taken me the better part of 15 years to recover from that, and in the meantime I tried working for others and I enjoyed it. In the end, though, I think once you have run your own company for a while, it is incredibly difficult to do anything else. It was inevitable that if I ever got well enough, that I would want to start something of my own again.

It was a long and hard journey, but I am finally better, and I am ready to start again. I am taking all the hard earned lessons into this venture, and I want to do it even more differently this time.

I promised myself that this time around, I would:

• Surround myself with people who will challenge me and expand my perspective.
• Accept the fact that I do not have all the answers
• Do things the way that we are meant to:
  • Bring in expertise we do not have
  • Have someone in the team right from the start focused on marketing
  • Technically, BDD, TDD, Agile, Lean, ““The only way to go fast is to go well””
• Focus on people first
• Focus on the journey, not the destination

One thing I realised as part of this journey is that doing things differently means that all the tools, technologies, and processes out there don’t quite fit.

With #muster, we are starting with one of the easier parts, and streamlining the developer experience. We are ending up building a lot of other things in the process, but they all take longer.

With choosing to do things in a very different way, we don’t know exactly how it’ll all pan out, but it will an interesting journey

Project Stargate: $500,000,000,000(i.e. $500b, the GDP of Singapore) in AI over the next four years, starting with $100,000,000,000 (i.e. $100b, the GDP of Bulgaria). https://lnkd.in/getadcFN

These numbers boggle the mind. The California fires have been estimated to cost between $250b and $275b, which is just about half the total investment into Project Stargate.

How much of this money is likely to be spent on mitigating bias? What about on exploring the risks of AI? I don’t mean AGI, Singularity, or about AI taking jobs. I mean the day-to-day risks to ordinary people: the spreading of misinformation and biases. We all saw the damage that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica brought to the world. How much more damage could this cause?

How might these new tools be used to manipulate, control and oppress? How might these tools further marginalise those who are already disaffected?

Yes, there might be fantastic breakthroughs, but at what cost?

I am somehow reminded of the poem “First they came…”:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—
And there was no one left to speak for me.

The Manhattan Project, which built the first Nuclear bomb, cost $2 billion, which, adjusted for inflation, comes to $27 billion. America wants to spend almost 20 times that amount over roughly the same time on Project Stargate.

I apologise for the doom & gloom, but I have genuine concerns about the risks at play here. How about you? Are you worried, excited or both?

Dave uses the example of Agile, which is a sore topic for many. He talks about how selling shrinkwrapped agile is not going to work, because it is different for each company, and each team. It has to be custom fit.

It’s hard to disagree. I do think though that a lot of the practices that are talked about as being the “best,” are good practices. However, a challenge is that a lot of these practices depend upon or are meant to encourage “good mindsets.” The mindsets are far more valuable than the practice itself.

The question then becomes about how prepared an organisation or team is to shift their mindset. As you probably know, it sometimes feels like it would be easier to move the earth than some mindsets.

I encourage people to consider practices (good, bad and ugly) with a critical perspective to understand the mindset behind it. Only then is the question of relevancy capable of being answered. If the mindset that is encouraged can be achieved in another way, that could be your version of that practice.

The problem, of course, is that communication is difficult, and our ability to perceive possibilities is limited by our own perspectives. Sometimes, it takes a period of trying out a practice before we can begin to understand its potential value.

What do you think about best practices? Are there universal ones?

Agile really shines here. In fact, it was agile that pointed out that the original estimates (which we thought was pessimistic) was actually still optimistic. The two weeks of user story mapping saved us a great deal of pain.

As Robert C. Martin puts it:

Planning can destroy hope… and show us just how screwed we are.

By constantly reassessing plans, Agile gives us an early warning system when things are slipping.

I used to think that the point of Agile was to be faster. The book Clean Agile argues that the point is to fail sooner.

In our case, Agile gave us an early warning system. It killed hope before hope killed the product.

Instead of going into overdrive and being a workaholic (again), we simplified scope, adjusted the deadline and found a better balance.

We like to think of this as the way of the tortoise.

How has Agile helped/impeded you and your team?

We live in the belief that what is good for “the machine,” is good for the individual - be it capitalism, the government, or society. What if we worked on the basis of the opposite.

Not all those who wander are lost.
— J. R. R. Tolkien