Emily Bache @emilybache@sw-development-is.social

At first I thought that using GitHub's Codespaces to teach my news apps class was mostly for my benefit.

But more and more, I see this as much an equity issue as a convenience. Here's why:

https://www.thescoop.org/archives/2023/03/22/teaching-newsapps-with-codespaces/

IPCC delivers final warning. Some IPCC cartoons from recent years.

#IPCC #climate #climateemergency

Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on #ClimateCrisis: act now or it’s too late | Climate crisis | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-climate-crisis-report-delivers-final-warning-on-15c

“This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

– UN secretary general, António Guterres

As an experiment, since I have a 20-year-old-blog, I’m going to occasionally repost particularly juicy 20-year-old pieces. Today: How, in 1988, I personally took down AOL.: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/18/AOL

Arlo's Danger Sense is hard to find on the internet, so I'm amplifying it here:

1) More than 15 mins since last checkin.
2) The code I'm working on is not unit tested.
3) The code I'm working on is not visible in the UI.
4) I'm feeling anything but calm, relaxed, and happy.
5) I'm trying to think -- about anything.
6) I haven't said anything in 2 minutes.
7) I'm remembering something -- anything -- for later.
8) I'm proud of the code I'm writing.

🎙️ Clare Sudbery & @emilybache explain in this interview what they will be sharing in their workshop at #newCrafts.

If you want to lead your team(s) to bettering their skills, join Clare & Emily on May 23-24, in Paris. Details & tickets 👉 https://training.ncrafts.io/Technical-Leadership-Clare-SUDBERY-and-Emily-BACHE.html?utm_content=buffer2203c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

https://vimeo.com/807453737?utm_content=buffer681d7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

“I was a paid-up member of the male–female brain brigade. It took me several years and a long struggle to realize that I was just not finding the kinds of differences I expected.”

Cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon explains that there was never a scientific basis to the myth that male and female brains are biologically different — instead, a major reason why even young children behave differently depending on their gender is because they are “tiny social sponges”.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00738-2

@PragmaticAndy @marick This is one of my favorite examples of Weinberg's Law of Raspberry Jam: The manifesto spread the message wide, but it got really thin: too thin for the spirit/principles/why's to survive, but sufficiently "hot new thing" to fuel the hype cycle for decades (much of which seems to have rounded down to "agilifying" pre-agile concepts and practices so folks could keep justifying their same old practices.

And now? It just means "good" full stop. Example:

Encountered a person just a few weeks ago, arguing that solving for the general case up front (vs narrow focus and incremental delivery) was necessary so we could be "agile" — not the first time I've heard that, but it was stunning due to the speaker's utter lack of perceived need to do more than make an appeal to the "agile" authority to make their case.

An almost perfect example of the complete inversion of meaning relative to anything that would've been recommended on the XP mailing list pre-manifesto.

Great food for thought for a more productive handling of flaky tests.

https://dev.to/grunet/flaky-tests-are-not-the-problem-24j#analysis-of-the-ideal-lifecycle-of-a-flaky-test

At UW’s Center for an Informed Public, we’re currently seeking nominations for our CIP Award for Impact & Excellence, which will recognize an individual or organization that has made outstanding contributions, achievements, or bodies of work that significantly resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse. The award recognizes work in one or more of four categories: research, education, engagement, or law and policy.
https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/03/01/2023-cip-award-for-impact-excellence-nominations/

Work which is expected to be done solo tends to be dependent and partial: partial in that it cannot be completed by one individual, and dependent in that it’s normally a small cog in a wider project. Solo is perhaps the worst possible way to get such work completed. https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/solo-work-considered-harmful/

This article about Germany being unattractive to desperately needed workers fails to address a major issue: sexism.

Working in German IT is like getting into a time machine. Germany lags behind much of he continent on the number of women in IT, and there’s a large pay gap.

https://blog.honeypot.io/women-in-tech-germany/

https://www.dw.com/en/why-germany-is-not-attractive-for-foreign-workers/a-64936856

Specification By Example is a collaborative process that can bring stakeholders to an unambiguous shared understanding of what the software's going to do. There's no tool that improves upon it. Use a spreadsheet. Use a whiteboard. Use Cucumber. What matters is the collaboration. If we all walk away with the same understanding, it's done its job.

As with UML before it - another way to collaborate on design - it jumped the shark the second someone said "Oh, and then we can generate code..."

Following on from my post yesterday about how the real product of software development is the team, here's a good post by @david_harvey@twitter.com along the same lines, but with a lot more useful thoughts.

It struck me more than 20 years ago that if change is the one constant, then we should focus on building capacity for change. I see so many "digital transformations" baking in yesterday's business model and throwing away the one thing that could help them adapt tomorrow.

http://www.teamsandtechnology.com/dh/blog/2009/10/20/the-scrum-picture-is-wrong-scrumgathering/

★ Just published a new episode of Oddly Influenced: /Governing the Commons/, part 4: creating a successful commons.

I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a similar improvement. 20 minutes.

Podcast and transcript: https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/episodes/governing-the-commons-part-4-creating-a-successful-commons/transcript

Legendary developer, trainer and podcaster, Clare Sudbery (https://www.linkedin.com/in/clare-sudbery-she-her-35939540/), will be running a training day session on "Adding tests to legacy code" at @SoCraTes_UK on June 1st.
Get a ticket while you can: https://buff.ly/40auz9o

"Agencies often do not value the importance of maintaining code, and the funds that are available are few. In requests for funds, research groups omit the funding request for a software engineer, knowing that it is unlikely to be approved."

https://pub.towardsai.net/code-reproducibility-crisis-in-science-and-ai-fa2f2ec955b4 #research #code #quality