pages tagged latent-agilityYareev's schmonz.comhttps://schmonz.com/tag/latent-agility/Yareev's schmonz.comikiwiki2024-03-27T16:21:31ZWhat I'm Doing Nowhttps://schmonz.com/2024/03/27/now/Amitai Schleier2024-03-27T16:21:31Z2024-03-27T15:06:09Z
<p>We’re getting over our third bout of strep in as many months.
Shabbats together haven’t been happening at all.
Two family get-togethers for grownups’ birthdays had to be delayed until a health window opened.
Kids’ birthday season is about to begin, and we might get to stick to the schedule if the weather changes soon too.</p>
<p>Our in-home weather has lately been cooler and calmer.
Whether the wind is blowing one way or the other, one can always attribute the trend to many possible causes.
As not-always, the current effect is more consistently pleasant time together.</p>
<p>I know better than to think the wind won’t change direction, but the new way things are going gives me a new (and decidedly sunnier) feeling about my chances of reestablishing myself professionally.
This is helpful in absolute terms, and also relative to my new job.
It’ll require a tiny bit of travel, but mostly I’ll work from the home office.
I’ll say more about it once I’ve started.</p>
<p>In the meantime, as time permits, I’ve been doing my usual Open Source work.
Somewhat unusual: I’ve been holding weekly-ish meetings for notqmail developers to rebuild momentum and ship our next release.
We’re quite close.</p>
<p>The last couple weeks of my available technical attention have been hijacked by dealing with intended and unintended changes in Apple’s latest developer tools.
I had promptly and semi-naively updated, only to find quite a lot of broken pkgsrc builds.
I say “semi-naively” because as I see it, whenever I have a dependency on anything, keeping my foot on the gas is part of the deal.
It doesn’t usually take a couple weeks to deal with the fallout.
I’ll write a post about what I found and how I worked around it.</p>
<p>Compensating for this unpleasant surprise, I also got a pleasant one: ikiwiki has gained some more maintainers and we’ve shipped a new release!
I had been hoping for some time that new energy for ikiwiki would appear, because my bandwidth for such things is being spent on notqmail.
Et voilà!</p>
Think. Design. Work Smart: Amitai Schleier - Music, Programming, Disciplinehttps://schmonz.com/talk/20221029-think-design-work-smart/Amitai Schleier2022-10-30T14:13:42Z2022-10-30T13:57:10Z
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/alexboly">Alex Bolboacă</a>
had me on his show to talk about
the connections — some of which I’m aware of — between making music and developing software,
an enjoyable professional life in legacy code,
and how I got this way.</p>
<div class="video-container">
<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vvUwHagmxvY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>
JC-JUG December 2021: Bob Allen on Coaching Teams to Do the Impossiblehttps://schmonz.com/2021/12/08/jcjug-december-2021-bob-allen/Amitai Schleier2021-12-08T21:10:19Z2021-12-08T20:50:51Z
<p>For
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG/events/282467826/">the December meetup</a>
of
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG">Jersey City Java</a>,
<a href="https://twitter.com/CuriousAgilist">Bob Allen</a>
presented
<a href="https://youtu.be/CfubTbNqfQM">Coaching Teams to Do the Impossible… as they see it, and, without straining their backs</a>.</p>
<p>About the presentation:</p>
<blockquote><p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li>We ask a whole team to do things they have never even contemplated doing,</li>
<li>For an extended period of time (4 to 6 weeks),</li>
<li>And to do it repeatedly,</li>
<li>All together,</li>
<li>With a WIP limit of ONE.</li>
</ul>
<p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/CfubTbNqfQM">Watch</a>.</p>
November crowdfunding updatehttps://schmonz.com/2021/12/04/november-crowdfunding-update/Amitai Schleier2023-04-22T11:55:21Z2021-12-04T10:43:48Z
<p><em>[ <a href="https://schmonz.com/crowdfunding/">About my public-facing work</a> ]</em></p>
<p>Starting now, I’m moving my monthly posts from
<a href="https://schmonz.com/link/patreon/">Patreon</a>
to my own website here.
Why?</p>
<ol>
<li>I prefer to own my data</li>
<li>There are many ways (Patreon merely one among them) in which people can fund my public-facing work</li>
</ol>
<p>My
<a href="https://latentagility.com">corporate work</a>
focuses on
<a href="https://latentagility.com/tech/">learning together, experientially</a>.
My public-facing work is similar: I’m creating learning experiences, Open Source code, and combinations thereof — at present, like so:</p>
<ul>
<li>Packaging third-party software for a cross-platform Unix package manager</li>
<li>Developing an email server</li>
<li>Fixing bugs and adding features to a (mostly) static site generator</li>
<li>Facilitating ensemble/mob programming sessions</li>
<li>Streaming solo programming sessions</li>
<li>Organizing meetups about programming and Agile</li>
</ul>
<p>For more, see
<a href="https://schmonz.com/crowdfunding/">crowdfunding</a>.
I’m grateful for your support.</p>
<h1>Experiences</h1>
<p>Held our final
<a href="https://pubmob.com/offerings/amitaischleier-legacy-open-source-fridays/">Legacy Open Source Fridays</a>
ensemble session of 2021.
Started back up with
<a href="https://www.twitch.tv/schmonzie">streaming my solo programming sessions on Twitch</a>,
mostly pkgsrc-related so far.
Improving my stream a bit each time.</p>
<p>For
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG/">Jersey City Java</a>,
experimented with having a vendor present their product: a brief introduction to the tool, followed by
<a href="https://schmonz.com/2021/11/11/jcjug-november-2021-pejman-ghorbanzade/">programming together with Pejman Ghorbanzade</a>.
Glad we tried it.
If we do another vendor session sometime, this’ll be how.</p>
<p>Building momentum with
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Southern-Connecticut-Agile-Meetup/">Southern Connecticut Agile</a>,
our second meetup was an extremely well liked
<a href="https://schmonz.com/2021/11/23/soctagile-november-2021-esther-derby-matthew-carlson/">conversation with Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson</a>.
We’ll skip December (too much holiday stuff), though
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG/events/282467826/">JC-JUG’s session</a>
will be of interest.
I’m excited for our January SoCTAgile speaker.</p>
<h1>Build farm</h1>
<p><a href="https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.1#v30">VirtualBox 6.1.30</a> fixed the macOS Monterey
<a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/57678431">troubles I encountered last month</a>.</p>
<p>Upgrading Devuan 3.1 to 4.0 was straightforward, as was updating Ubuntu aarch64 to 21.10.</p>
<p>After much reading and trying stuff,
<a href="https://schmonz.com/2021/11/22/now/">bringing up a 2007 MacBook</a>
(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.</p>
<h1>pkgsrc fixes</h1>
<ul>
<li>Doing cross-platform testing of an Ubuntu 21.10 fix for libspf2 (works nearly everywhere else, but needs more fixing on OpenBSD and Void)</li>
<li><a href="http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2021/11/29/msg034809.html">Reviewed a fix needed in my cross-platform build environment</a>, now awaiting commit by the author</li>
<li>lighttpd: upstream patch for use-after-free</li>
<li>libhighlight: bump required API version to fix runtime errors seen on wiki.netbsd.org</li>
<li>ikiwiki: provide pkgsrc-compatible default values for configurable paths to fix runtime errors seen on wiki.netbsd.org</li>
<li>Linux with non-executable glibc (such as Ubuntu/aarch64 21.10): fall back to detecting GLIBC_VERSION another way</li>
<li>qmail and djbdns: catch up to pkgsrc’s switch from RMD160 to BLAKE2s hashes</li>
<li>gdk-pixbuf2: fix macOS build</li>
<li>ucspi-tools: fix Linux build</li>
<li>bootstrap: note that Solaris 11 works</li>
</ul>
<h1>pkgsrc updates</h1>
<ul>
<li>mob to 2.1.0</li>
<li>texttest to 4.0.8</li>
<li>p5-App-Sqitch to 1.2.0</li>
<li>py-approvaltests to 3.1.0</li>
<li>getmail to 5.16</li>
</ul>
<h1>pkgsrc additions</h1>
<ul>
<li>ucspi-udp</li>
<li>tcpexec</li>
<li>fd-proxy</li>
<li>pikchr</li>
<li>AusweisApp2 (to pkgsrc-wip for further attention)</li>
<li>dstp (also to pkgsrc-wip)</li>
</ul>
<h1>notqmail</h1>
<p>Legacy Open Source Fridays has produced a few pull requests which we’re still working through.
I made some progress on getting
<a href="https://github.com/notqmail/notqmail/pull/224">Add tests for qmail-send:job_*() functions</a>
past the Solaris autobuilds.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h1>ikiwiki</h1>
<p>My motivation for packaging pikchr was to be able to integrate it into ikiwiki.
Ikiwiki already has a
<a href="http://ikiwiki.info/plugins/graphviz/">graphviz plugin</a>
which I’ve been using to generate
<a href="https://schmonz.com/software/acceptutils/">somewhat explanatory diagrams of acceptutils</a> — 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
(<a href="https://www.twitch.tv/schmonzie">subscribe to my Twitch</a>).
In the meantime, you can
<a href="https://youtu.be/MxbqNHbjTBc">watch me create the pikchr package</a>.</p>
SoCTAgile November 2021: Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson on There Are No More Early Adopters of Agilehttps://schmonz.com/2021/11/23/soctagile-november-2021-esther-derby-matthew-carlson/Amitai Schleier2023-04-29T19:51:15Z2021-11-23T10:27:23Z
<p>Welcome back to
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Southern-Connecticut-Agile-Meetup/">Southern Connecticut Agile</a>!
For our November meetup,
<a href="https://twitter.com/estherderby">Esther Derby</a>
and
<a href="https://twitter.com/mcarlson_sb">Matthew Carlson</a>
presented
<a href="https://youtu.be/XuZ39j7UE20">There Are No More Early Adopters of Agile</a>.</p>
<p>About the presentation:</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/XuZ39j7UE20">Watch</a>.</p>
<p>Papers, talks, books, videos, and blog posts mentioned along the way:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://amzn.to/3l1KMuT">Crossing the Chasm</a>, Moore 2014 (popularization of work by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Rogers">Rogers</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0cALkZGPQMIYi15eXZhR3hHeEU/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-v6BfnGJBA852xzPc_r6qhg">Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony</a>, Meyer and Rowan 1977</li>
<li><a href="https://scrumguides.org">Scrum Guide</a>, Schwaber and Sutherland 2020</li>
<li><a href="https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/story-points/Index.html">Story Points Revisited</a>, Jeffries 2019</li>
<li><a href="https://amzn.to/3cE7KDN">Software Estimation Without Guessing</a>, Dinwiddie 2019</li>
<li><a href="https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/videos/whats-the-story-about-agile-data/">What’s the Story About Agile Data</a>, Magennis 2018</li>
<li><a href="https://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/original_waterfall_paper_winston_royce.pdf">Managing the Development of Large Software Systems</a>, Royce 1970</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management">Total Quality Management</a>, Wikipedia</li>
<li><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0cALkZGPQMIa1ozM05fLU4yekU/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-JTCGlkyznd1bgZaorNwyoQ">Customization or Conformity? An Institutional and Network Perspective on the Content and Consequences of TQM Adoption</a>, Westphal, Gulati, Shortell 1997</li>
<li><a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B0cALkZGPQMISS1DNUZ1dU4zM0E?resourcekey=0-APlJY09WZ53nClmqJKqBBw">Matthew’s stash of Institutional Theory papers</a></li>
</ul>
JC-JUG November 2021: Pejman Ghorbanzade on Continuous Regression Testing Using Toucahttps://schmonz.com/2021/11/11/jcjug-november-2021-pejman-ghorbanzade/Amitai Schleier2021-11-11T10:23:10Z2021-11-11T10:14:48Z
<p>For
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG/events/281715735/">the November meetup</a>
of the
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG">Jersey City JUG</a>,
<a href="https://twitter.com/heypejman">Pejman Ghorbanzade</a>
presented
<a href="https://youtu.be/Nn5We6yQ8Kg">Continuous Regression Testing Using Touca SDK for Java</a>.</p>
<p>About the presentation:</p>
<blockquote><p>Making code changes to real-world software systems without introducing unintended side-effects is non-trivial.
There are methods and tools to help us mitigate the inherent risks.
One of these methods is regression testing that helps us verify the behavior of our software using a large number of test cases.
But regression testing frameworks are clunky, have high maintenance costs, and produce results that are difficult to manage at scale.
These limitations have largely made their use an after-thought for most software teams.</p>
<p>Touca is an early-stage startup trying to rethink regression testing.
They offer open-source SDKs that enable describing the behavior and performance of software workflows by capturing values of variables and runtime of functions.
They remotely compare this description against a previous trusted version and report differences in near real-time.</p>
<p>Join us for an interactive session to explore this new approach to regression testing and to evaluate Touca’s implementation of that approach.
We will try their new Java SDK (https://github.com/trytouca/touca-java) to see if we can safely refactor two well-known code Katas in a friendly ensemble programming session.
We will take turns to share our thoughts about this new approach, and share general tips about changing real-world codebases safely and efficiently.</p></blockquote>
<p>If you missed it, you missed an ensemble programming session writing Touca tests for an existing codebase.
Pejman’s explanation and demo is short and sweet.
<a href="https://youtu.be/Nn5We6yQ8Kg">Watch</a>.</p>
SoCTAgile October 2021: Steve Doubleday on Three Frames of Software Developmenthttps://schmonz.com/2021/10/29/soctagile-october-2021-steve-doubleday/Amitai Schleier2021-10-28T22:43:38Z2021-10-28T22:23:22Z
<p>I noticed last week that the
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Southern-Connecticut-Agile-Meetup/">Southern Connecticut Agile Meetup</a>
had gone maintainerless and decided to take it on.
Welcome back!
For our October meetup,
<a href="https://twitter.com/sjdayday">Steve Doubleday</a>
presented
<a href="https://youtu.be/0_Jre_46fBg">Three Frames of Software Development</a>.</p>
<p>About the presentation:</p>
<blockquote><p>The uneven adoption of agile methods over the past couple of decades can be usefully understood as coming from a difficulty executives have in letting go of three frames — the Building, Project, and More frames, and accompanying metaphors.
These are ubiquitous in the culture of many large IT organizations, and they conflict with what agile enthusiasts think are better ways of building software.
In these terms, SAFe has been successful because it blends agile concepts with the Building, Project, and More frames, allowing older and newer ways of thinking to co-exist.
This uneasy coexistence can be thought of as an importance source of problems in SAFe efforts.
In turn, this suggests that useful paths forward may need new frames and metaphors.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/0_Jre_46fBg">Watch</a>.</p>
JC-JUG September 2021: Mike Coon on You Get What You Ask Forhttps://schmonz.com/2021/09/15/jcjug-september-2021-mike-coon/Amitai Schleier2021-10-28T22:43:38Z2021-09-15T08:17:24Z
<p>For
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG/events/280486226/">the September meetup</a>
of the
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG">Jersey City JUG</a>,
<a href="https://twitter.com/mikeonitstuff">Mike Coon</a>
presented
<a href="https://youtu.be/78o_lWES1BA">You get what you ask for — so you better ask for what you want</a>.</p>
<p>About the presentation:</p>
<blockquote><p>As we progress in an organization what we ask for and what we ask about become key to engaging our teams and to maximizing value.
We’ll talk about how subtle changes in our approach can ignite creativity and provide a sense of ownership in our teams.
We’ll also talk about how to build and maintain credibility through careful consideration of what we ask about.</p>
<p>This presentation is for:</p>
<ul>
<li>Scrum Masters</li>
<li>Product Owners</li>
<li>Managers and Dev Lead types</li>
<li>Anybody else hoping to get things of value from others</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/78o_lWES1BA">Watch</a>.</p>
Code PaLOUsa 2021: Two Midwesterners Politely Invite You To Explore Codinghttps://schmonz.com/2021/08/20/codepalousa-2021-two-midwesterners/Amitai Schleier2021-08-20T16:25:13Z2021-08-20T16:06:13Z
<p>On Friday, August 20,
<a href="https://twitter.com/AgileFaye">Faye Thompson</a>
and I once again co-facilitated
<a href="http://codepalousa.com/Sessions/1968">Two Midwesterners Politely Invite You To Explore Coding</a>,
this time as a 3-hour workshop at
<a href="http://codepalousa.com">Code PaLOUsa 2021</a>.
The abstract:</p>
<blockquote><p>Wonder what it’s like to do what programmers do?
Maybe people have tried to explain it, but didn’t put it in terms that computed for you.
Or maybe you would like to become more technical, but the mere thought of trying to code has felt intimidating.
Today is a new day!</p>
<p>Faye’s a non-programmer from Ohio, Amitai’s a sometimes-programmer from Illinois, and with your help, we’ll solve a problem by thinking and coding together.
If you want to, you can take a brief turn at the keyboard; if not, no biggie.
When we’re done, we think you’ll have a new kind of feeling about code and coding.
You might even want to pursue it further.</p></blockquote>
<p>We didn’t have much audience participation, possibly because our session had to be rescheduled from Wednesday (against other half-day workshops, but I was traveling to Germany that day) to Friday (against regular-length talks).
On the plus side, Faye and I got to spend a few hours together pair programming, culminating in a last-minute pivot to “FizzBuzzBlerg”.
And though we don’t usually record this material, the conference has been capturing every session.
I’ll share the video if and when they publish.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://schmonz.com/2021/08/20/codepalousa-2021-two-midwesterners/slides/">Slides</a></li>
</ul>
JC-JUG August 2021: Nayan Hajratwala on Power Up Your Gradlehttps://schmonz.com/2021/08/10/jcjug-august-2021-nayan-hajratwala/Amitai Schleier2021-10-28T22:43:38Z2021-08-10T21:18:37Z
<p>For
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG/events/279894561/">the August meetup</a>
of the
<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Jersey-City-Java-User-Group-JC-JUG">Jersey City JUG</a>,
<a href="https://twitter.com/nhajratw">Nayan Hajratwala</a>
presented
<a href="https://youtu.be/CTRpz1D-r_I">Power Up Your Gradle</a>.</p>
<p>About the presentation:</p>
<blockquote><p>Does Gradle make you sad?
Are slow & flaky builds stealing your time?
Are you a Maven maven, longing for the days you could write incomprehensible build files in XML rather than Groovy?
If so, this session is for you!
Together, we will delve into some techniques to keep your Gradle builds simple and maintainable.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/CTRpz1D-r_I">Watch</a>.</p>