This has been a pretty fun few weeks. I did a talk (“Agile at Amazon”) at an AgileScotland/ScotlandIS event in Glasgow. My main claim was that there are two vital ingredients for effective software project. Firstly, you must accept that during a project you will go through a learning process. You learn about technology, the business and the problem domain. Your development process needs to embrace this learning process, and make it easy (not painful) to change direction throughout the project as you learn new stuff. Secondly, software development is done by human beings, not robots. A good development process will accept this, and play to our human strengths whilst protecting us from our weaknesses. If you want a successful project, you need engineers who are enjoying their job, learning a range of relevant skills and working in a supportive environment. The rest of my talk described what a typical month at Amazon Scotland looks like.
Ezra Cooper kindly continued the talk-karma by agreeing to come along to Amazon and give us a talk on the work he’s doing on the Links project, It was a really good talk, and delivered well. I’m pleased to see that Ezra got a lot out of our questions during the talk. Thanks again, Ezra!
In other spoddery, I’ve been using the amazing Omniscient Debugger again. This time I’m trying it out on non-toy examples, and have been feeding bug reports back to Bil. If you want to see the debugger in action, check out the wonderful Bil delivering a talk at Daniel Friedman’s 60th birthday celebrations.
Finally, I’m excited to be going to a week-long course on the Foundation of Computing Science in a few weeks. I’ve done a fair amount of reading in this area in my spare time, but it’s great to have an opportunity for a bit of focused learning (and question asking!).