In this special episode I say hello after two years in silence, and I share what has been going on in the meantime.

I wrote a book. It's a novel. It's about how we treat each other at work, it's about families, friends, ambition, disappointment, mental health and the impact of 24/7/365 software culture and globalisation and AI on our workplace.

In this short episode I introduce you to the reasons behind writing the book and tease a continuation of this podcast.

You can find out more about the book on the Human Software Website.

If you'd like to hear more about the Rands Leadership Slack you can go here.

My blog called Surviving Software is still right here and you can also find me active on LinkedIn.

What is a platform? How does one appear and what do you do with it when you have one?

Exploring the line between planned organisational change and operational overhead. Overview of the state of platforms and introduction to Team Topologies concepts around Team API, Thinnest Viable Platform and Conway's Law.

Review of the talk I gave at the DevOops meetup in Amsterdam, November 22nd 2023.

Slides are here:

https://speakerdeck.com/bownie/that-one-script-you-wrote-is-now-a-platform

Youtube is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxf8LPTr6tc

More resources here:

https://richardwbown.com/that-one-script-you-wrote-is-a-now-a-platform/

To kick off a new season, I start with a deep dive into the QUEST framework-which-isn't-a-framework. QUEST is a mnemonic that helps you remember essential software delivery tasks. This previews my upcoming "We Are Developers" conference talk in Berlin 2023.

In this episode, I take a view on the Agile Manifesto, the 5 Ideals from the Unicorn Project as well as John Romero's 10 Programming Principles and rewrite them, group them and then provide you with a way to remember how to apply them (and what they mean) every single day whether in your team, for your teams, or your customer.

NOTES

https://agilemanifesto.org/

https://itrevolution.com/articles/five-ideals-of-devops/

https://richardwbown.com/software-engineering-happiness-the-five-ideals/

Scope: ensure that the team can work on a context over which they have complete control. See Team Topologies, see SOLID principles, see DDD.

Flow: Work in small batches with complete mastery of our domain.

Agility: Make our context better every day. Improve our experience.

Freedom: to experiment, to try without fear.

Delivery: provide solutions to customers with minimal possible overhead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqdZAYcwfY

https://github.com/anttiviljami/romero-programming-principles

https://richardwbown.com/john-romeros-ten-principles-for-building-great-software/

Kent Beck’s Presentation about Refactoring and Cost of Upfront Design:

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/refactoring-cleaning-code/

It’s a great talk and worth watching. Because it exposes the social side of software development.

QUOTES