Software on a String

All that exists are trade offs

Marjan Venema — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 20:11:31 +0000

Dishes

Have you ever done the dishes by hand?

If not, picture this: stack of dirty plates, glasses, utensils, pots and pans; big bowl filled with hot water and dish washing liquid; running tap to rinse foam of;

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Exercising for Happiness Week on Happy Melly

Marjan Venema — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 09:44:24 +0000

Tomorrow will see the kick off of the “Exercising for Happiness” week at Happy Melly. I am very honored to have been asked to lead the discussion on this in “#happiness” channel of Happy Melly’s Slack team.

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Why do you always have to be the responsible one?

Marjan Venema — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 15:17:39 +0000

When is the last time someone trod on your toes and you decided to let it go?

When is the last time someone really hurt your feelings, you desperately wanted to hit back,

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Building trust a skill?!

Marjan Venema — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 19:06:41 +0000

About a week ago, I happened upon this article by Randy Conley: Building Trust is a Skill and Here’s How to Learn It

The title just riled me up.

It felt manipulative,

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Name your sprints

Marjan Venema — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 19:54:00 +0000

Are you in a team following Scrum? Or any other method using iterations to do your work?

Are you naming them?

I don’t mean names such as “Sprint 1”, “Iteration 2016-25”. Those aren’t names. Not in my book,

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Stop using anemic daily stand-up questions

Marjan Venema — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 19:15:59 +0000

Daily stand-up time. Yay?

When was the last time you jumped up and were raring to go when the reminder for your daily stand-up popped up?

Ya. I know. A long time ago.

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I and they, or we

Marjan Venema — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 14:44:29 +0000

A short while ago I had a conversation with someone about my aspiration to become an agile coach. We talked about agile, about teams, about leading and leadership. We also dug into a couple of concrete examples of what I’d done to help the team I was in improve.

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Perils of Copy-Paste Programming

Marjan Venema — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 20:13:40 +0000

Double oops

Interestingly, my change “solved” the perceived bias in the shuffling code, but it actually introduced real bias in an otherwise correct implementation of the Knuth-Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm.

This was pointed out to me yesterday (11 March 2017) in the comments on the answer I copy-pasted by Steve Marx.

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Emotional intelligence pays

Marjan Venema — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 11:49:25 +0000

Soft skills are getting recognized more and more as being important in the workplace.

Rainer Starck’s TED talk predicts a crisis with regard to the workforce around 2030. It’s an interesting listen. If you don’t want to listen to the full talk,

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Head scratching with a TargetParameterCountException

Marjan Venema — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 21:18:13 +0000

Ever introduced an extra parameter on a method, tracked all its usages and made the compiler happy by providing a corresponding extra argument in all the calls of that method?

Sure you have. Either that or removed a parameter from a method.

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