ownership

For me, lots of projects have some degree of grind or frustration or irritation. There’s not one project I could point to and say that was just delicious through and through. I think Agile sets out to solve a big bunch of problems, but I think there’s something underlying that set of problems. There’s something about western culture that trains them not to do certain things. If I do something that of that smell or feel, there’ll be a big wrongness coming my way. People slowly learn not to do certain things.

Yeah, we did one self-organising project, we were working under the mantra of better software faster. The idea was quality and speed, better software faster, yeah, brill. I would reckon we could double the speed just by going faster. The theory was that we could get twice the performance out of the team by doing it faster, just by sorting out all the little problems.

I joined a local software house and I was there for five years. For three of those years I was stuck in the basement doing VB (and I didn’t like VB). I wasn’t getting too well with one of my leaders, with looking for feedback and not getting it basically, with the usual result. The environment was very bad for my health, my eyesight, my optician recommended I get out of there. So I taught myself Java, because I realised it was quite heavily in demand in the industry and the software house had hardly any Java coders. And then I told some people that I’d learnt Java. Apparently there were abou