Friends Archives - Yves Hanoulle

Welcome in 2021.

What a year 2020 has been.

In our previous new year video, we wished everyone a healthy life. It turned out even more important than we thought.

We had our reasons to think about health. The father of one of my godchildren was fighting against cancer since August 2019.

Although Simon survived 2020, in December he heard that he is terminal.

And meanwhile we were all inside and wore a mask when we came out.
Even if we didn’t always like it, we followed the rules. (Even at moments it was not fully required)
We know very well that we are blessed with a large house and a large garden. Which means it’s a lot easier for us than many others.

Our family saw the effects of covid-19 when my parents-in-law have caught the virus in March, including a stay in the hospital. (And they feeling the effects longer than that.)

I also lost a colleague (non covid related).

There were also positive things in 2020

Just before the lockdown we added a wall between two children rooms.
Finally doors in our house.
When the hobbies and sport clubs fell away, the children worked on their physical condition from home.
By working from home, I paid more attention to my eating and sleeping habits.
We switched back to one car.
Joppe got his theoretical driving license and started studying at the University of Gent.
We doubled our number of solar panels.
The biggest change is in our video…

Professional:

I changed clients during the first lockdown, including a remote interview.
Together with my friend Vasco Duarte, I launched: an audio addendum for my “tips from the agile trenches” book
After 10 years and 35 worldwide offline events, I facilitated two Online CoachRetreats (With Oana Juncu)
I launched the online community version of MetaCoaching and found partners to spread this worldwide.
I stopped as lead Coach CoderDojo in my hometown. Leaving the organisation in the hand of a great team.
I mostly worked while walking. In total for 7.5 million steps in 2020.
More than 10 friends and colleagues bought a walking desk in 2020 (the highest number since I started with this since in 2012)
I found the ada talks, next to a concept of events with the focus on women in IT also -if you ask me- the best format for an evening event.
A new team taking over Who is agile South-Africa, to make a more diverse version.
Also the team behind Who is agile in Denmark, found new energy to continue working on a first version for 2021
The first contacts where made for a Who is agile in Nigeria book.

We hope just like you, we could get rid of covid-19 by the summer. (Although I’m afraid it will take the full year)

As Els works in a living group with people who are at risk, she will probably receive the vaccine in February.

For myself, and the children, it will be a lot later. And yes all of us, we will take the vaccin the moment we can.

I sincerely hope we can keep following the rules until we have beaten the virus.

Already for a few years, I see this new year’s letter as two directional communication, here are my question for this year:

What kept you going this year?
What where the good things in your life this year?

(I assume we all talk already so much about the negative parts this year, I’m ignoring this for now)

Positive reaching out for 2021

Yves

A great developer:
– is good at coding
– understands business
– knows the value of communication
– thinks about her own limitations
What am I missing?

— Yves Hanoulle 🇪🇺 (@YvesHanoulle) January 29, 2020

I make tweets like this, because I know my agile friends won’t let me down.
I got a lot of great ideas.

values simplicity (Added by Anthony Palumbi)
values feedback (Added by Anthony Palumbi) ==> that is important part of communication, that is wurth mentioning.
tests or writes her own tests (Added by Jennifer Riggins)
documents her own code (Added by Jennifer Riggins)
contemplates ethical ramifications of code (Added by Jennifer Riggins)
mentors or parallel programs with other devs (Added by Jennifer Riggins)
doesn’t smell too bad for pairing. (Added by Dave Nicolette) Duh
shares learnings (Added by The abbot of unreason) ==> how could I forget learning?
can and offers to help her peers become better (Added by Irene Kuhn)
admits to limitations (Added by The abbot of unreason) ==> I should have written that.
considers the broader context into which changes occur (Added by The abbot of unreason)
thinks about ramifications (Added by The abbot of unreason)
can troubleshoot (Added by The abbot of unreason)
has empathy for the user (Added by The abbot of unreason)
writes as little code as possible (Added by Matthew Skelton)
- writes as little “readable ” code as possible (Enhanced by Grant)
balances short-term and long-term solutions to problems (Added by Scott Dunn)
offers those options to the business (Added by Scott Dunn)
attends to folks’ needs. (Offered by Bob Marshall as a replacement for everything) ===> I would say not replace, yet it should indeed be the goal of all developers.
- In a later tweet Bob added the antimatter principe with more explanation.
knowing your internal and external customer. Not just their names but who they are, the way they think and what their actual needs are. (Added by David Benson)
is nice to people! (Added by Lanette Creamer)
cares that non-technical people understand what their code does (Added by Lanette Creamer)
has humility (Added by Lanette Creamer)
Jens Scheidtmann wants to replace “is good at coding” with
- writes instrumented code
- considers error handling first
- writes robust code
thinks creatively (Added by Charlotte Ward)
helps others grow (Added by JanTielens)
can explain complex stuff to various audiences (Added by JanTielens)
is open to feedback (Added by JanTielens)
is open to hear other opinions (Added by JanTielens)
in case if an error/bug/issuse he/she always blames his/her own code first, instead of blaming the framework, libary, other code (Added by JanTielens)

Christian Baumann reminded me of the 1x engineer, which is a great list. I personally don’t believe in the 10X developer. There is a reason why I wrote great developer and not 10 x

And then my friend Kris blamed me for making his life as Scrum trainer harder.

And I need to repeat over and over again in my Scrum trainings that Developer Team members are not necessarily technical people, let alone programmers 😭 you’re not helping me, Yves! 😉

— Kris Philippaerts (@kphilippaerts) January 30, 2020

You are welcome Kris. 😉 I still love you just the same.

I agree with the scrum guide that a development team contains more then coders. And indeed the “good at coding” part is probably the least important of being a great developer.
In fact the tweet was inspired by a conversation I had some months ago, where I spoke with a rather good coder, yet this person said he was to not interested in other things in this list.

It made me realize that my tweet might give the impression that I want all developers, be great developers. That is not needed. Although once such a developer in a team does make a huge difference. yet not in the 10 x developer way.
And that might give the impression I don’t value the not great developers.

the great development team.

Actually if we add a few more things, we come with a definition of a unicorn developer. The ideal not existing developer.
And then we come back to a definition of the great development team.
Where for me, the whole team should contains as much of these ideas. As a team.
That is where diversity plays a role in a team. As if this list grows even larger (which will happen for sure, knowing the agile community) it will be even impossible to have a team that contains all these things in the whole team…

Ale is one of these amazing conferences.

(XPDay Benelux, AgileEE, AYE are some of the others)

I am sitting in an aiport, alone, like I will be for the next 9 hours before I will be home, were I will arrive in a dark quite home as my loving family will be asleep.

I feel lonely, I feel sad: I know this feeling. I’m in what Jim McCarthy calls recoil.

Recoil is technically the word that describes what you get when you fire a weapon.

You get a push back. And every time you achieve or experience something amazing, you will get this feeling. I think it’s a feeling that creates adrenaline junkies. They go for their next shot of adrenaline, to avoid recoil.
The better way, is to accept recoil, as it’s a message that your body sends you that you experienced something great.

Will I go to a small little corner of the airport and cry? I sure feel like it.
yet luckily I have a better solution. What I learned from the core protocol bootcamps. Is that to deal with recoil, I should go on adventure. Go out and do something new.

To something crazy, let my life be guided by serendipity. In an aiport, I don’t have much options for that. I could think of passing security as an adventure, yet I have done this already many times and that is also behind me.
The best adventure I can think, is to sink myself in a book.
To what adventure has #ALE13 inspired you?

Hug

yves

PS Here is some inspiration how you can spread the spirit from ALE and make the world resemble that better place ALE is.
The 9 nana’s

PPS If you want to follow my idea and our out of books:

1) Buy The Agile leanpub bundle. 12 books related to agile for 50 dollar. A lot of authors were at #ALE

2) Buy any of the books suggested by ALE13 participants.

The last few weeks, I was discussing about the concept of thoughtleaders.

For me the idea of a thought leader, is that one person has a brilliant idea, she spreads that idea and she creates a tribe of people following that idea.
Our current culture is one of worshipping these people and they are instant famous (for 15 minutes or for eternity)
I personally have a few problems with this.

I don’t like the worshipping part. As humans these are not better or worse than other people.
It actually puts a lot of pressure on these people and for some people it even creates the impression that they are god. We have seen a few examples of brilliant people who did stupid things on a personal level. I think our system of worshipping is partly to blame for that.
What is worse for me, is that this is a very limiting model.
It means that only brilliant people can come up with idea’s: bummer for me, I’m not brilliant. And bummer for you, 50% of the people their IQ is below average.
(Ok sorry, of course not my readers, you are all above average )
I believe that most ideas are actually created by networks of people.
The ideas created by many people are of higher quality then when they are created by one person.
On top this all, you can’t copyright an idea, so for me it’s wrong that one person can dictate how their idea should be used.

That last point is interesting to think about, because one if the side effects of this is the law of raspberry jam: The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. Many thought leaders, try to counter this point by dictating that you can only do x their way. And yes, I have seen enough people trying to change something before they understand it, to understand why ThoughtLeaders ask this.

All of this has inspired me to think, there should be another model, instead the model of thought leaders, we should have ThoughtJockeys.

What is the idea of a ThoughtJockey, well one part is, its created by a bunch of people. So Instead of me telling you what it is, I point you to a document that was a created by a bunch of people. I want to encourage you to:

1 read it completely

2 Adapt the parts that you think should be adapted

3 If you agree or if you changed something, please add your name to the contributors list.

Yves, wait are you tell me the full internet has editing rights?

Yes

Isn’t that insane? What about the hackers, spammer etc?

That’s why I call it an exercise of trust.
I want to see what happens, and where it takes us. And yes, when (not if, when) we will take action. Let’s for now see what trust can create.

As my father wrote a few years ago, most laws are created by a bunch of people over many years and that make them much better then just ideas of one or 2 people.

Please check with me, what’s happening….

www.ThoughtJockey.org

Category: Friends

We wish you a free 2021…

Definition of a great developer

the great development team.

#ALE13 Recoil

Thought Jockey, a trust experience…

Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

the great development team.

Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

Interesting article? Dont hesitate to share

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