Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

quotes

The low status of software engineers

A couple weeks ago I read an article by Michael Church titled “How the Other Half Works: an Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers“. It is the story of Bill, who had two very different experiences interviewing for two different positions at two different companies: one as...

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“Do you expect too much from people?”

Last year, a coworker asked me if perhaps I expect too much from other people. I thought about it a moment and said: No. I do not accept the argument that I’m somehow inherently superior to most others. In fact it is because I know I am not superior that...

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You must manage what you can’t measure

We all know the quote: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. The quote is often incorrectly attributed to W. Edwards Deming. Thank goodness, because that sentiment is absolutely ridiculous, and Deming is one of my heroes. In fact, a more accurate Deming quote is: The most important figures...

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There is no essence of Agile

real agile is: talk to the users directly, know their pain point, address it, repeat. -someone on Twitter who I disagree with In many conversations about Agile, especially as of late, I read something like the above tweet. I don’t know where the idea that Agile can be distilled...

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Deploying a C# app through pip

“If we bundle up this C# application inside of a Python package archive we can deploy it through our internal CheeseShop server with very little work.” That sentence got me a lot of WTF’s and resulted in one of the worst abuses of any system I’ve ever committed. We...

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The myth of the brilliant jerk

Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high. – Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO So I was all prepared to write about how much I hate this quote, but Freddy Nager already did. It is thorough and insightful and explains how out of context this quote...

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Results are not the point, followup

In response to a previous post explaining the phrase “Results are not the point“, commenter RenRen Gabás says: Both approaches have their own place. It’s easy to see why Toyota/Lean works well with manufacturing and operations. Continuous service and operations needs continual improvements. However, there are times when you...

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An Unfoolish Consistency: Introducing PEP8 to a legacy codebase

Consistency with this style guide is important. Consistency within a project is more important. Consistency within one module or function is most important. The EVE source code, being initially developed before PEP8 existed, was based on Microsoft’s C++ style. Mostly this is manifested in UpperCamelCase function and method names,...

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Results are not the point?

The phrase “results are not the point” often confuses people new to Lean thinking. It confused the shit out of me, not having really understood it even after my first few books. This is a shame, because it’s such a simple thing. On Friday night, Danny got really drunk,...

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Agile project management versus agile development

I have a saying I like to use when discussing Scrum: Scrum is an Agile project management methodology, not an Agile development methodology. Scrum delivers tools for managing the project (planning, scheduling), but very little for how to develop (design, program, test) it. To do Agile properly, you really...

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