May, 13, 2024 archives

Because I was off on my small business side quest for the last 15-ish years, I have been working on coming back up to speed on what’s considered the state of the art when it comes to software development. I touched on some of that when writing about my memories of HomePage.com, but that still pre-dates when most people were talking about the development methodologies that have come to be known as “agile” so that is a topic I have been diving into.

I did come across this old blog post of mine with a reference to “extreme programming” and the then-new (to me, at least) concept of continuous integration which is a practice we had started rolling out at MySQL. A project idea I was kicking around recently was related to the “continuous peer review” concept. I still like firehoses of information like diff commit messages.

This talk on “Not So Extreme Programming” by Amitai Schleier was a great catch-up for me, and I also went through a LinkedIn Learning course on “Agile Foundations” that was a good survey.

But where it all comes back to for me is the concept that was popularized by the quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship.” To me, that is the very essence of what agile methodologies are trying to achieve. I started my career doing software projects that were released in physical form, but even thinking back to those projects the times when they were going the best was when we focused on making incremental progress and developing iteratively. I love that there’s a whole framework of systems and language around it now.

I should dig a little more into the criticism, because I am sure there are organizations that have found endless ways of doing it all badly.