Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas' post and talk about this. He 1) criticizes the overuse of GenServers, 2) the boilerplate code and large directory structures created by tools like mix and 3) gives a few ideas to deal with these issues. Amazing talk. https://pragdave.me/blog/2018/06/02/project-structure.html

Usually, the more a team advertise itself as Agile, the less agility it actually has. I myself have never seen Agile work well, not even close. I saw plenty of make-believe and head-in-the-sand and as mentioned in earlier comments, insane amounts of cargo culting. I really like the way Dave Thomas put it: https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/ He also made a talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M These days this is the only methodology I follow and it works wonders, anything more I feel is just noise. At the end of the day nothing replaces actual engineering and understanding what you're doing.

One of my favorite Ruby post series of all time: Pipelines using Fibers in Ruby (1.9) http://pragdave.me/blog/2007/12/30/pipelines-using-fibers-in-ruby-19/ http://pragdave.me/blog/2008/01/01/pipelines-using-fibers-in-ruby-19pa… I swear it was actually a 3-part series, but only 2 parts I can find right at the moment.

Yeah Dave Thomas has written about it here too http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/ and also Mike Cohn one of the developers of scrum has criticised blindly following methodologies (which is sort of related) http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/dont-blindly-follow

Dave Thomas (one of the original agile signer peoples), gave this amazing talk criticizing modern, commercialized agile instead of the developer-focused way of "developing with agility". Give it a watch: http://www.thoughtworks.com/talks/the-death-of-agile Blog post version: http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/

The better critique is from one of the authors of the agile manifesto, who recommends a shift in language: > I don’t think anyone could object to a ban on the word when it is used as a noun. That’s just plain wrong. “Do Agile Right” and “Agile for Dummies” are just two of the innumerable attacks on the English language featuring the word. They are meaningless. Agile is not a noun, it’s an adjective, and it must qualify something else. “Do Agile Right” is like saying “Do Orange Right.” > But, beyond the grammar problem, there’s a bigger issue. Once the Manifesto became popular, the word agile became a magnet for anyone with points to espouse, hours to bill, or products to sell. It became a marketing term, coopted to improve sales in the same way that words such as eco and natural are. A word that is abused in this way becomes useless—it stops having meaning as it transitions into a brand. ... > Let’s develop with agility > You aren’t an agile programmer—you’re a programmer who programs with agility. > You don’t work on an agile team—your team exhibits agility. > You don’t use agile tools—you use tools that enhance your agility. https://pragdave.me/thoughts/active/2014-03-04-time-to-kill-agile.html

Dave Thomas, one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto [1] wrote an article called "Time to Kill Agile" [2] a few years ago (which he subsequently re-titled "Agile is Dead"). He has some good insight on how Agile (the methodology) got to be something very different from what they intended. Originally they were trying to break away from a rigid methodology, not introduce a whole new one. Unfortunately, if you don't codify something into a set of rules, it's pretty hard to get people to follow it, and it wasn't long before "experts" were building formal processes out of it. I've never seen it work well, and the more ardent the adherents are, the worse it seems to get. I think every team needs to find the approach that works best for them to itemize, prioritize and communicate progress. In my experience the two most important aspects of moving a project along are simply communicating what needs to be done and recognizing effort. [1] http://agilemanifesto.org/ [2] https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

According to this PragProg do in fact offer 50% of gross. https://pragdave.me/blog/2009/10/19/pragmatic-bookshelf-royalty-rates.…

There’s a fascinating talk by Dave Thomas, one of the authors of the agile manifesto, speaking of the simple meaning of the manifesto and the insanity of the Agile Industrial Complex bureaucratic cult created around it. Agile is Dead - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M Here’s a blog post by him: https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

That's ironic since the Agile Manifesto was originally written by software developers, in 2001. The problem is that since then - as Dave Thomas put it in his "Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)" post "The word “agile” has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products." (https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html)

"The word 'agile' has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products." - Dave Thomas (Manifesto for Agile Software Development author) https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

So waterfall can be agile as long as everyone is on the same page about it? I'm afraid I'm lost. Incidentally, it turns out I'm a late comer to the "stop saying agile" point–an author of the Agile Manifesto was saying that 5 years ago https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

Related: Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility): https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html From the blog post: > And, unfortunately, I think time has proven me right. The word “agile” has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products. > So I think it is time to retire the word “Agile.” > I don’t think anyone could object to a ban on the word when it is used as a noun. That’s just plain wrong. “Do Agile Right” and “Agile for Dummies” are just two of the innumerable attacks on the English language featuring the word. They are meaningless. Agile is not a noun, it’s an adjective, and it must qualify something else. “Do Agile Right” is like saying “Do Orange Right.”

He's either a troll or lacks reading comprehension. The first article he links to is well summarized by this paragraph: "And, unfortunately, I think time has proven me right. The word “agile” has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products." (https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/) "Doing the right thing at any time" is still a perfectly valid principle, though.

> but in Erlang you don't want to touch that feature with a ten foot pole. It's hairy and incredibly annoying to work with It's pretty much the exact opposite in Elixir. The only thing you really have to wrap your head around is the switch between the quoting context and the unquoting context... which is pretty much no different from understanding macros period. The definition syntax looks just like a method definition, except it's "defmacro" instead of "def", and the macro body receives an AST instead of (or in addition to) your usual arguments. But I'm probably not doing it justice... http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/macros.html https://pragprog.com/book/cmelixir/metaprogramming-elixir Here Dave Thomas creates a simple "returning" macro, you can just watch the screencast if you're feeling lazy: http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/11/05/a-simple-elixir-macro/

Relevant : http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/

here's Dave Thomas' blog post on the subject: http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/

For people interested, you can do something like this in Ruby right now that has nearly the same syntax: http://pragdave.me/blog/2007/12/30/pipelines-using-fibers-in-ruby-19/

What I noticed using this to read a couple Ars Technica articles was it worked really well for short words. But, if a longer complicated word appeared, at say 600 wpm, I would miss it. It seems like an adaptive algorithm based on word length would improve the speed even more allowing it to go faster on short common words and slow down on longer unusual words. Also, there is bug that sometimes causes two words to appear at once. Sometimes they are overlapping vertically which is basically impossible to read. Try reading http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/ to see what I mean.

I've followed Unison for a while, but this talk (along with Part 2) blew me away. I downloaded Unison locally and have been going through its Exercism.org track to learn. I've been having a lot of fun with it! Some past threads: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512955 (128 comments from May 8th, 2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20807997 (25 comments from August 27, 2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652677 (131 comments from June 27th, 2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34307552 (84 comments from January 9th, 2023) That being said, this conference talk was only put on YouTube on January 21st, 2023, so I figured I'd share. Here's a couple awesome blog posts from Dave Thomas on the language as well: - Immutable Code in Unison (https://pragdave.me/discover/unison/2023-02-26-immutable-code.html) - Abilities: a New Way to Inject Behavior and State (https://pragdave.me/discover/unison/2023-03-11-abilities/)

When an idea for running a project that is based on making it as easy as possible to use and waste as little time as possible. Having to use a term like: "metamethodology" is crazy. Check out http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/ for a reality check about Agile from one of its inventors. I quote: "However, since the Snowbird meeting, I haven’t participated in any Agile events,1 I haven’t affiliated with the Agile Alliance, and I haven’t done any “agile” consultancy. I didn’t attend the 10th anniversary celebrations. Why? Because I didn’t think that any of these things were in the spirit of the manifesto we produced. Having conferences about agility is not too far removed from having conferences about ballet dancing, and forming an industry group around the four values always struck me as creating a trade union for people who breathe. And, unfortunately, I think time has proven me right. The word “agile” has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products. So I think it is time to retire the word “Agile.”