Since May, I’ve been posting a new video just about every day. What’s in the videos? A short piano piece, played as well as I can quickly learn it. “Short” means, based on a sample size of 72 videos, two and a half minutes on average. (You’ll probably agree, coming from the Agile in 3 Minutes guy, that tracks.) Don’t like what you’re hearing? No problem, the next piece is short too. Here’s the full YouTube playlist, totaling over 3 hours of music so far.
Half a lifetime ago, I was already a musician and a technologist. I’d have believed the future existence of a video-hosting platform such as YouTube. Everything else, nope, no way that’s future-me.
I’d given this recital hoping for a tuition grant. Having heard me play, the university accepted me as a music major. Problem is, I hadn’t wanted that. I wanted CS classes more than anything and my advisor from the music department couldn’t get me into those.
I frazzled out at that university, and almost certainly would have regardless of which courses I took.
8 years later I tried again at another university. At that point music was what I wanted to study. I graduated at 30 with a bachelor’s in it.
I also graduated with a changed belief.
My belief at the time of the pictured 1997 recital, and at the beginning of the fall 2005 semester: reading music is an aptitude, I lack it, and I compensate well enough by memorizing quickly.
My belief a few years later: sight-reading is a skill. By practicing it, I’ve gotten much better.
Obvious to me now, and surely obvious to you well before now. But young-musician-me had been resigned to playing only pieces that others could show me and help me with. I would never have believed a different experience were possible.
Lots of lessons in this: for me personally, for how I raise (and praise) my kids, for how I work in and with teams. Most of all: by changing a key belief, I changed how I relate to music. You can see and hear the fruits of that.
How did I get that belief to change? Well, that’s the magic, isn’t it. Lots of things had to change a little bit.
What else changed when I gave myself a more direct relationship to music-making? Another thing I never would have guessed: making more direct relationships with you. In conclusion, behavior, conditions, beliefs, mindset, behavior, and so on, forever. But mainly, thanks for listening. And I don’t mean about the music.
Our third child arrived yesterday, on April 26, at 7 pounds. She was determined to make her debut in the car but instead came out moments after her mom got on the hospital bed. Meet Galila Yara Schleier:
She comes home tomorrow to meet her brothers. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, et al. will get to hold and smell her soon.
About the name:
Galila Yara honors Rebekka’s beloved aunt Judy and Amitai’s sweet uncle Rami.
Galila
From Hebrew Galil, the most mountainous region of Israel, the country where Uriel and Rami grew up.
- It signifies Judy’s endless love of the mountains and embodies the meaning of Rami’s name: “high”
- Taken on its own, the Gal portion of the name means “wave”, representing the love of the ocean that Judy and Rachel shared and experienced together
- The initial G honors Dianne’s mother, Grace
Yara
From Hebrew and Arabic words for “small butterfly”, “forest”, or “honeycomb”, depending on how you read it.
- It reflects the beauty and sweetness of nature, which Judy always celebrated and appreciated
- The Y honors Yehudit (Judith) and the Ra honors Rami
- Like Amitai’s own middle name, it represents Yaakov and Rivka, Uriel’s and Rami’s parents
Galila Yara
We chose the name “Galila Yara” to encompass our families’ rich memories and backgrounds and to celebrate Judy and Rami and their loving families. We invite you to join us in welcoming Galila into ours.
About the date
- 4/26 is the day before Finias’s birthday (he’s 2 today!)
More nice properties observed after the fact
If you think of another reason this is a nice name, please pass it along.
More photos
For the December meetup of Jersey City Java, Bob Allen presented Coaching Teams to Do the Impossible… as they see it, and, without straining their backs.
About the presentation:
As some of you likely have some appreciation for, what I and my fellow technical and product coaches do, when we are lucky, is a hard sell from the get-go. Here are just a few of the reasons:
- We ask a whole team to do things they have never even contemplated doing,
- For an extended period of time (4 to 6 weeks),
- And to do it repeatedly,
- All together,
- With a WIP limit of ONE.
Keep in mind, the clients are typically very large companies, whose employees often experience ‘transformation fatigue’ (been there, done that, didn’t even get the dang t-shirt). Let me tell you some stories about how it is done, why and how it works, and why you might even want to do it yourself.
[ About my public-facing work ]
Starting now, I’m moving my monthly posts from Patreon to my own website here. Why?
- I prefer to own my data
- There are many ways (Patreon merely one among them) in which people can fund my public-facing work
My corporate work focuses on learning together, experientially. My public-facing work is similar: I’m creating learning experiences, Open Source code, and combinations thereof — at present, like so:
- Packaging third-party software for a cross-platform Unix package manager
- Developing an email server
- Fixing bugs and adding features to a (mostly) static site generator
- Facilitating ensemble/mob programming sessions
- Streaming solo programming sessions
- Organizing meetups about programming and Agile
For more, see crowdfunding. I’m grateful for your support.
Experiences
Held our final Legacy Open Source Fridays ensemble session of 2021. Started back up with streaming my solo programming sessions on Twitch, mostly pkgsrc-related so far. Improving my stream a bit each time.
For Jersey City Java, experimented with having a vendor present their product: a brief introduction to the tool, followed by programming together with Pejman Ghorbanzade. Glad we tried it. If we do another vendor session sometime, this’ll be how.
Building momentum with Southern Connecticut Agile, our second meetup was an extremely well liked conversation with Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson. We’ll skip December (too much holiday stuff), though JC-JUG’s session will be of interest. I’m excited for our January SoCTAgile speaker.
Build farm
VirtualBox 6.1.30 fixed the macOS Monterey troubles I encountered last month.
Upgrading Devuan 3.1 to 4.0 was straightforward, as was updating Ubuntu aarch64 to 21.10.
After much reading and trying stuff, bringing up a 2007 MacBook (64-bit system, 32-bit EFI) with Lubuntu 21.10 was ultimately uneventful. It’s no speed demon. I doubt I’ll keep it running. But the tricks I’ve just learned should apply to my original 2006 Mac Pro, boosted many years ago with SSD and lots of RAM and needing only an OS that can be kept current. In the meantime, a cursory build of my usual packages turned up a build failure in libspf2.
pkgsrc fixes
- Doing cross-platform testing of an Ubuntu 21.10 fix for libspf2 (works nearly everywhere else, but needs more fixing on OpenBSD and Void)
- Reviewed a fix needed in my cross-platform build environment, now awaiting commit by the author
- lighttpd: upstream patch for use-after-free
- libhighlight: bump required API version to fix runtime errors seen on wiki.netbsd.org
- ikiwiki: provide pkgsrc-compatible default values for configurable paths to fix runtime errors seen on wiki.netbsd.org
- Linux with non-executable glibc (such as Ubuntu/aarch64 21.10): fall back to detecting GLIBC_VERSION another way
- qmail and djbdns: catch up to pkgsrc’s switch from RMD160 to BLAKE2s hashes
- gdk-pixbuf2: fix macOS build
- ucspi-tools: fix Linux build
- bootstrap: note that Solaris 11 works
pkgsrc updates
- mob to 2.1.0
- texttest to 4.0.8
- p5-App-Sqitch to 1.2.0
- py-approvaltests to 3.1.0
- getmail to 5.16
pkgsrc additions
- ucspi-udp
- tcpexec
- fd-proxy
- pikchr
- AusweisApp2 (to pkgsrc-wip for further attention)
- dstp (also to pkgsrc-wip)
notqmail
Legacy Open Source Fridays has produced a few pull requests which we’re still working through. I made some progress on getting Add tests for qmail-send:job_*() functions past the Solaris autobuilds.
Legacy Open Source Fridays has also produced a few people with motivation to continue programming notqmail. I had not imagined this possibility, and am gratified that it’s happened.
ikiwiki
My motivation for packaging pikchr was to be able to integrate it into ikiwiki. Ikiwiki already has a graphviz plugin which I’ve been using to generate somewhat explanatory diagrams of acceptutils — but I’m not thrilled with my diagrams, pikchr appears designed to run in precisely this kind of context, and maybe I’ll like it better. When I write the pikchr plugin for ikiwiki, it’ll be streamed (subscribe to my Twitch). In the meantime, you can watch me create the pikchr package.
Welcome back to Southern Connecticut Agile! For our November meetup, Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson presented There Are No More Early Adopters of Agile.
About the presentation:
After 20 years, Agile has in a sense become pervasive. While it’s neither mandated nor regulated, everyone’s heard of it, and lots of organizations understand the legitimacy it confers. Still, some folks continue to approach changing to Agile as though it were a brand new set of ideas. How’s that working out? Join Esther and Matthew in a conversation about what motivated early Agile adopters, what’s different now, and how we can more effectively bring about the changes we seek.
Comments from participants include “One of the best online sessions I have participated in at least this whole year” and “Best talk of any sort I’ve been to (online or otherwise) in a very long time.”
Papers, talks, books, videos, and blog posts mentioned along the way:
- Crossing the Chasm, Moore 2014 (popularization of work by Rogers)
- Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony, Meyer and Rowan 1977
- Scrum Guide, Schwaber and Sutherland 2020
- Story Points Revisited, Jeffries 2019
- Software Estimation Without Guessing, Dinwiddie 2019
- What’s the Story About Agile Data, Magennis 2018
- Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, Royce 1970
- Total Quality Management, Wikipedia
- Customization or Conformity? An Institutional and Network Perspective on the Content and Consequences of TQM Adoption, Westphal, Gulati, Shortell 1997
- Matthew’s stash of Institutional Theory papers
Work with Amitai in 2022
Unique opportunity to be in the presence of someone who will make you a better, smarter version of you.
— Kent Beck, Agile Manifesto coauthor
Would your team, department, or organization benefit from a rare combination of technical coaching and influential conversations?
Amitai has the gift of bringing new techniques and perspectives to a large group of people without pushing or putting people on the spot. He is a great facilitator and coach, and offers his experiences without being overbearing.
— Alex Schladebeck, Chief Executive Officer, BREDEX GmbH
Would you personally benefit from individualized sessions with an experienced, inquisitive, and empathetic conversation partner?
He created a safe space, in which I was able to sort through unstructured thoughts and come out with much more clarity on the other side.
— Niklas Lochschmidt, Tech Lead, BRYTER GmbH
Maybe you’re facing a learning opportunity in some code, another kind of challenging situation at work — or both.
Whenever I pair with him I immediately feel calm and grounded.
— Andrea Goulet, Chief Executive Officer, Corgibytes LLC
Let’s find out whether I might be useful to you.
If you were to invite Amitai to come help you, I am confident you’d receive excellent help for your money.
— Ron Jeffries, Agile Manifesto coauthor
Schedule a free 30-minute call.