f3yourmind

Amazing! I just read Scott Hanselman’s blog post on finding geek balance outside of the geek world.  I started commenting on his blog, but realised I was blogging on his blog.  Here’s my own lumber-yard, geek-balance experience.

Just before Christmas, Fiona and I decided to have a deck built in the back yard.  I tossed the contractor’s quote out and decided to build it myself.  Why?  Same reason as Scott and I also specifically wanted to try my own personal Zen and the Art of Deck Building.  Fiona was naturally skeptical but indulged my mid-life crisis moment.

A much simpler design

An apprentice in a world craftsmen. DIY shops are intimidating.  I was an apprentice in world of journeymen and craftsmen.  I eventually found a benevolent craftsman who was humble enough to help me without judging me.  His ideas helped me simplify my design considerably and, more importantly, gave me some confidence.

Really listening to feedback. My paper design was a BDUF .  The moment I placed the wood on the ground, Fiona suddenly changed the location of the deck.  Short tale:  I am still building – new requirements still emerge from my main user.  Early on, I resisted every change with enormous annoyance which resulted in huge arguments.  Then I realised that the needs were real and the new requirements came from seeing how the deck looked with each step of construction.  I had an abstract BDUF and Fiona was taking in real feedback -  being agile!  And I was being rigid!

Living in the moment. I tried hard to live in the moment.  When I was digging a hole, I dug the best hole ever, deep, straight and true, until I hit a concrete block in the way.  Then my beautiful hole was a mess and I was angry at this block and tried to get past the block and continue digging my hole.  Zen moment – the task had changed.  I focused on the concrete block. Chipped away one tiny piece at a time, eventually it fractured and I could continue digging my beautiful hole.  I was focusing on the future, not the present and that screwed up my productivity.

Conflicts in collaboration. So I tried to live in the moment with everything from that point onwards.  When I was cutting wood – I cut wood and tried to get the best cut ever – to find beauty in the cut.  The one day my son, Khaleel, helped out and I got annoyed that he was messing up – it was not as beautiful as I wanted it.  After calming down and living a moment of fatherly guilt, I let him help me dig another hole and I just let him … to live in his moment.  He loved the texture, smell, etc of the sand and dirt.  I imposed my own hang-ups of not wanting to get really dirty.  I realised that he was more into having fun and I was messing up his fun – until I decided to live in the moment with him – by his values.

First release into production

Finding the balance. Building the deck has been one of the nicest non-geek experiences in recent times.  It made me think differently, behave differently, regard people differently and maybe, one day, it will quietly help me build software better.  I think the trick is to find a place where you will always be the traveler in a world of benevolent journeymen.  And when you can’t find that world, then just be a benevolent journeyman in world of travelers.

“Hello.  My name is Hope and I am a Service.  Last week I was asked by a View to do something.  I told the View that I can’t do it.  So he asked the Fat Controller.  The Controller sent me the same message and I just took exception.  What kind of service does he think I am?”

“Hello Hope.  We are glad you joined us.  You are not alone.  Look around the room.  We’re all struggling to find our own identity.  Those of us that have been around for a long time are still recovering from being forced to convert DomainObjects to DTOs.  The more recent ones feel like meaningless proxies, and last week we had a guy who thought he was a Service but he was just a HelperClass.”

“It’s as if I am losing touch with reality.  My own DomainObjects don’t even interact with me directly.  Now processes want a piece of me too.  I think I am schizophrenic.  Am I now a process?  A wrapper point for Transactions?  I swear to you, there are days when I even think I am a stored procedure!”

“Ohhhh, noooo!”

“But I know who I am. I am a Service.  I like working with DomainObjects.  They need me.  Somethimes they can’t do everything on their own, so I help out.  I complete their world and it makes me feel like I belong in the right place.  One guy even refactored me from the domain package to a services package.  Can you believe that!  Actually, now that I’ve said it aloud, I am not surprised that I feel more and more disoriented.”

“Disoriented?  Oh boy, we really can’t help you here.  You see we’re recovering from abusive Controllers and Views and when you told us the story in the beginning, we thought we could help you but you’re just a …”

“But that story is true.  Apparently there was this Process on other side of  this MessageBus that needed something and he asked the Fat Controller who got involved with View and then I got sent this message and …”

“WTF?!!  The Process asked the Controller…”

“Yeah!  You won’t understand … it’s after your time.  It’s really a WebServices Controller but I hear that he also feels abused and just wants some REST.  You think there’s a support group for Controllers?”

“Wait.  I remember this other crowd … uhhmmmm … sorry – those weren’t Controllers, those were Presenters working with Models and Views, but I used to be confused as a Delegator and I can …”

“You’re NOT HELPING!!!  I told you I am a Service!  And I am confused!  I want to be part of the domain again!  I feel disoriented!  And I …”

“And I told you that we can’t help you.  The truth is that you are DOA.”

“Dead on Arrival?”

“No! DisOriented Architecture.  You know … they don’t know where to put that, so it becomes a service.”

“But, but … I am a Service … <sniff>”

“YOU WERE NEVER A SERVICE!  YOU’RE ONLY HOPE!!!”

I have received a lot of positive feedback from many new faces for the SPIN talk I did this week.  Thank you.

But I am worried.  In the 45 minute talk, I did 5 minutes with Ruby code and cucumber.  Now so many people want to use cucumber.  Good for cucumber.

I think I should have stressed my point a lot more.

Take-Home #1: Find a way to make the life cycle of requirements part of your workflow.  Should it be a hard dependency?  If the requirements change, then do you want the build to break?  When requirements have a life cycle independent of the code’s life cycle, then you are opening yourself to waterfall-ish problems.

Take-Home #2: Agile in name and process can only take you so far.  You have to live it in your head and in your life.  For me, agile has a very Zen-like characteristic.  You need to live in the moment, absorb the feedback in that moment and adjust your next action in response to all this stimuli.  We are just like an amoeba that reacts to changes in pH.  But the difference is that we are capable of controlling our re-action or subsequent action.  An amoeba is agile by process only.

Take-Home #3: BDD can help you to change your coding and architecture attitude for the better.  It is subtle in its intrusion, but profound in its impact.  The subtley makes it dangerous.  It is not about the clever use of words, it is about the way those words impacts on your code and your resulting architecture.  So find your own cucumber and that does not mean you should go looking for another gherkin.

Perhaps I was not responsible enough.  My actions and words have affected people in a way that I did not intend.

At the 45th SPIN meeting in Cape Town tomorrow, I will be sharing the “stage” with Karen Greaves.  Karen will be talking about the lessons she has learned in rolling out Scrum to a large enterprise.  I have a feeling that it is about scaling Scrum out to more than 10 people.  Karen has done this for 80+ people and I am certain that her experiences will reach an audience outside of Scrum circles as well.

I will also be giving a talk about Agile Requirements.  It’s about behavior driven stories that go beyond traditional, fully dressed used cases.  However, I will focus a lot more about the process and thinking behind this approach as opposed to the code behind the stories.

I always meet very interesting people at SPIN.  Please take 2 hours from your evening and join us for some great geek chat at the Bandwidth Barnyard at 6.30pm on 15 April.

Update. You can get the presentation here.  The size is optimized for iPOD and is quite viewable on your desktop as well.  The tiny bit of ruby code is included in the zip as well.

A few of nights ago I had chat with Scott Hanselman about diversity in teams.  This experience and the .NET Rocks experience were really important learning moments for me.  Although you have the opportunity to “rewind” and be edited, I decided not to do that and just let me be heard as I am – unedited.

As usual, we all tend to be our own worst critics and I know I have some bad habits.  These are the ones of which I am most aware.  (a) I ramble on a bit before getting to the point and I miss the point sometimes, (b) I tend to interrupt people when they speak, and (c) I unconsciously complete people’s sentences.  Have a listen to the Hanselminutes podcast and please give me your feedback, good and bad.

The show could have gone in any number of directions but Scott did an amazing job of keeping it on a particular path.  There were some things that I thought about after the show and just want to elaborate a little bit.

The code that you write affects people on your team. Although we glossed over this and it felt like a weird application of Ubuntu, I really believe that your code impacts other people on your team.  I always joke about not carrying code to your grave.  Seriously, your code will be visited by the “second” team because your project is never complete until the “second” team comes into play after your first production release.  So writing code that is a positive experience for someone else is important.  Anyway, your code is collectively owned, and read more than written, right?

Greetings and introductions should be meaningful. The words that Scott used to describe me are nothing more than tangled mess of words that are superficially meaningful.  From that description, all you can do is categorise me by your previous stereotypes associated with those words.  Knowing people and learning how they feel at that moment in time and making that meaningful is all about discovery focused conversations.  Most people know that I really look for simple solutions to everything.  Having a conversation is easy, but choosing the right words to say is tough, especially if you are protecting yourself with a personal space wall or probing through someone’s personal space wall.

Learning is more important than being the best. I now really believe that just learning to be better for yourself is the most important thing.  It is a personal thing only.  It is not about being the top dog.  Aiming for top dog is an ego trip and power positioning becomes a vehicle for the journey.  Power destroys lives and spirits.  I have been down that road, practiced it, hated myself and been a subject of it as well.  I call it power oriented architecture.

Values and behavior compromises are contextual. We spoke a bit about clashing of value systems and I said that it is about compromise.  I think compromises only work in a context.  I have a  friend and it bothered me that he was, on occasion, a snob.  After a long time, I made peace with his snob-mode.  He was a snob in certain contexts and I acknowledged that and looked passed that and realised that the value systems and derived behavior we exhibit changes as we shift through contexts.  Ideally, it shouldn’t but we are humans and are fallible.  (Sure, we do have core values that are consistent across contexts.)  Knowing when people are applying altered values and behaving accordingly can help you create contextual compromises that can lessen the possibility of conflicts in teams.

Soft skills do not have hard recipes. Scott kept pushing me about techniques that we can use to work through these challenges in our teams.  I really did not have any.  After we stopped recording we both said that these are soft issues and there are no hard techniques.  Soft is soft. Period. It is really about becoming a better person – for yourself – and in so doing you become a better person for others.  I can’t coach this or teach this.  I can just share my experiences and thoughts on this.  And I am so very far away from not “being a jerk” as Scott politely put it.  The one thing I have seen consistently is that your “jerkness” is inversely proportional to your humbleness.

Voting for the first time in 1994 was significant. I opened the discussion about the important junction in time when apartheid was abolished and we voted freely for the first time.  This was significant because it divided our search for identity into two distinct eras.  It’s hard to manage diversity if we don’t have own identity.  Secondly, it was the most harmonious, collective experience of my life.  We stood in a queue from 8am to 6.30pm in Yeoville in Johannesburg.  In the queue we had old, young, black, white, Rastafarians, Muslims, Jews, almost every categorisation you could think.  But it was peaceful and celebratory.  It proved to me that human beings are capable of living together when we share a common ideal that we all believe in … even for one single moment.

If the real me is not Scott’s intro, then who am I? I am Aslam Khan.  I am a software developer.  I am a father, a husband, a brother and a son.  I am a neighbour, a friend and nice guy and a jerk. I am 40 and I am looking for balance.  I have two kids aged 8 and 5.  My thoughts are pre-occupied by the challenge of being a parent. I treasure my time with my family immensely but suffer serious guilts by not doing so.  My 5 year old child has a terminal disease and is classified as cerebral palsy which changed my view on many things.  My 8 year old child amazes me at his simplistic maturity and makes me realise that I am unnecessarily complicated.  I am a citizen of this world.  I wonder how many people will come to my funeral – it’s my measure of meaningful engagements.  I question whether writing software is a good way of becoming a better person.  I am hopeless at character assessments and my wife is my Deanna Troi.  I exist.