Bill Gingles

How to Sabotage Sprint Planning (episode #8) Assume capacity is always the same! OtterWorks Website: https://buff.ly/4hZMiJS Development Deep Drive: https://buff.ly/41kIjl3

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I've scheduled an online instance of my "Building and Using Shared Libraries" course. Topics include library versioning, the operation of the dynamic linker, dynamically loaded libraries, controlling symbol visibility, and symbol versioning. The course is scheduled as five half days on 7-12 October and in such a way that it should suit most people in Americas and Europe timezones. All going well, we even have time to look at the use of the GOT and PLT during lazy binding (see the picture). More info at https://lnkd.in/eX_JS93.

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Grumpy Joe's quote of the Week: "The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one." Seems quite a fitting reminder in this job market. Learn more wisdom from Grumpy Joe here: https://lnkd.in/eWk6eUuS #projectmanagement #leadership #GrumpyJoe #change1

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ITPro's analysis of our State of the Developer report highlights a serious issue: developer burnout is now at 'epidemic proportions.' Shockingly, more than 50% of developers indicated that burnout significantly contributes to their peers departing from their roles. Addressing this problem is crucial to avoid your team becoming another statistic.

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PMs: Are you getting folks engaged first in the outcomes driven by the projects, or the plans to support those outcomes? Are you bragging about the release or the impact? When you engage devs in the outcomes, they can engage in the fine details of ensuring the plans actually support them. Devs: Are you crushing tickets, or are you driving impact and using tickets to organize and communicate your work? The plan is your tool, not your master.

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Can't wait to dive into this series! #govtech followers & colleagues, please read & share! There's simply no reason for government services to be slow! A slow government service excludes taxpayers from using that service!

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As I prepare for appearing on a DEI panel, this article has been on my mind constantly. Here's my question to you: What do we do when DEI is used as an inspiration for harm, to generate goodwill for harmful projects, and as a source of expertise for building harmful tools ... but is never, ever, ever going to see the fruits of what was built and promised? Every tool that's been built to help me, a Deaf woman, only exists to be used for mass surveillance, espionage, and sports bars. Every tool that's been built to help me, a Neurodiverse woman, only exists to mine data and build tools that redirect thought patterns. Every accommodation I've ever had made available to me exists only because a "normal" person wanted it first. Every new piece of exciting technology is a promise broken, lie told, and weapon in disguise. Every tool that was built to hurt me, kill me, and destroy my ability to exist in society was sold to the public as a way to help me.

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What alternatives or mods to #Agile project management for software development have you tried successfully? Has anyone tried #ShapeUp as defined by Jason Fried and operated in #Basecamp? It appears to fix Agile’s biggest weakness - estimating how long a task will take - by flipping it on its head and asking ‘how long do we want to spend on it?’ instead. My experience showed that a simplified version of Agile seems to work really well - strip out most of the arcane technical stuff like velocities and focus on the germane - 1. Maintain a backlog and pay attention to basic hygiene - keep it clean, useful & accurate. Throw out things you will never do. 2. Plan sprints carefully - be realistic, but aim to fill the time available. This seems to be the hardest part for most teams - especially in embedded systems where demons are always lurking in the hardware, or old code bases and everyone knows estimation is hard. 3. Celebrate successes in the retrospective - this reinforces the team’s identity and cohesion. Everyone needs positive reinforcement. 4. Encourage everyone to talk about stuff that went wrong - estimates off by miles? Meetings disturbing flow? Other sources of disturbance? Unplanned work creeping in? Find strategies to fix these ASAP. This makes everyone feel listened to. 5. Define and refine the process with the team, make it theirs, then enforce discipline to stick to it and make it work, or change it. I am tempted by the Shape Up ideas, but #agile has 179,000 followers and #shapeup has 60. Are we all missing something? Here’s the ebook - https://lnkd.in/e-6fKm49 Thoughts?

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We've collectively decided to move away from using the strict Definition of Ready (DoR) to avoid any unintended bottlenecks in our collaborative process with the Product Owner (PO). Instead, we are adopting the "Good Enough Product Backlog Item (PBI) Guideline."The "Good Enough PBI Guideline" allows us to maintain flexibility and foster continuous collaboration between the team and the PO. This approach ensures that we can start working on items that are sufficiently defined but may still need some refinement as we progress. It encourages proactive communication, quicker iterations, and a more adaptive workflow.

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Scaling a team is often necessary as demand grows, but it’s essential to ensure it’s done effectively. Before adding headcount, consider if scaling is the best approach—sometimes addressing process inefficiencies or architectural issues can yield better results. If scaling is the answer, keep these factors in mind: * Define clear goals for each team. * Ensure accountability and support. * Minimize dependencies and avoid inefficiencies. * Scaling impacts people, process, and technology. Successful team growth requires careful planning to maintain efficiency and productivity. https://lnkd.in/eTkqykmG

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We're looking for a senior-staff PM now at Honeycomb, who will drive and own a multi-year vision for a net-new, permanent and significant expansion of Honeycomb's product surface area: https://lnkd.in/g2sM_TfC I’ve sat in this role for 3.5 years now, on and off, so you’ll be inheriting a lot of my regretful decisions. But I’m here to help you navigate that! It involves big data (for real), deep OSS involvement, lots of customers who love the product, and a great team to boot. If you like the idea of thinking through how you’ll turn 10M events per second into 100k, without breaking the bank, and making it as semi-automatic as possible, without losing signal on that data, and building a compelling UI that lets people build and monitor this stuff, this might be up your alley! Wanna talk with tons of customers and spicy sales engineers who have to sometimes commit code crimes to make stuff work, and then tell you about it? Wanna make painful prioritization decisions? Wanna find a way to execute on a multi-year vision and not get lost along the way? Click the link above. Wanna eat shit in front of a customer whose exact set of constraints violates every tradeoff decision you made? And then go back to them 4 months later with the good news that you’ve fixed it all? Come say hi! Wanna try to wrap your head around someone's perceived notions of how observability works, and find creative ways to reorient their worldview? Hi hello please apply. Wanna get deeply involved in the #opentelemetry community, become a core contributor, attend lots of community events, and be continuously infused with customer problems and feedback and also overall industry directions? You know what to do. Wanna work with a very product-minded engineering team who will push you to get stuff done? Wanna be a part of a group that is usually fast, usually right on the first go of things, and isn't afraid to try things and maybe pull them back if they're not working? Wanna have fun too? Clicky clicky.

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I wrote a blog post on how to best document a software implementation. https://lnkd.in/gW6NTVTs If you have ever been asked to do this, or might be asked in the future, and you don't really know where to start (or what some of the trade-offs might be), this might be a good place to start. I go through the main considerations (imho), consider various options, and land on some best-practice recommendations for fulfilling this ask.

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How to ruin a Developer's or UX's Designer's day. And save the product. Yes, let's explore and use your product. It's obvious...right? uh right? of course! Any child can follow along! Children can think like this until they are trained out of it. Obviously a skit. but how often has it happened in real life? If a person or company has a lot of hubris and doesn't think about and test edge-cases .. well .. at best one can get unexpected results. At worst - a catastrophic failure. ps. I don't know if he is talking to her, or a child off screen, or himself. I was first slightly offended. Then I realized made the skit even more amusing. Developers watching QA test the product. https://lnkd.in/eWZi8W22

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Teams thrive when solving their own challenges rather than following 'mysterious' frameworks. Real solutions emerge when people who understand the daily work collaborate to find answers. Good facilitation guides this natural process, helping teams unpack problems and build solutions they truly own. No black boxes. No 'prescribed-process'. Just practical results that stick because they come from within. The best answers are already in the room... they just need space to emerge.

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Matt Watson, this is a really insightful post with a strong foundation in cutting edge use cases, which is exactly where businesses thrive in a fast-moving market. I agree that clients prioritize communication and ownership over code elegance. That said, there's a case to be made for the role of 'beautiful code'—not for the client, but for the engineers. As products mature and stabilize, maintaining clean, well-structured code can make it much easier for engineering teams to iterate, onboard new talent, and stay adaptable to evolving customer needs. Refactoring as part of the R&D cycle can keep costs manageable and ensure your team remains productive long-term. Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on how they have balanced this in practice! #CTO #Leadership #TechStrategy

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#UncertaintyTax #InfluenceAtWork - How much would you pay for $50 gift card at a local retailer that must used in two weeks. On average people were willing to pay $45. Now offer a lottery ticket with 50% chance of winning a $50 and 50% chance of winning $100 Gift card. We would expect the perceived value to go up or stay the same. In fact it dropped to $16. To reduce the #UncertaintyTax at work, offer experiments and make bigger decisions reversible. The Catalyst - Jonah Berger

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What happens if you hire a bunch of developers to build a software system, but do so with no guidance or input from customers or end users? Easy, we know this - you end up with a software system designed and built *for* the developers who built it but that very likely does not fit the needs of your customers. Not super surprising or controversial. Sooo... what happens when you allow senior leaders to design and build your post-incident review process? Same thing. You will end up with an incident review process that meets the needs of senior leadership... but does not meet the needs of the rest of your organization. Senior leadership should not be your only - or even primary - stakeholder for incident reviews. The 1% needs insight into indicators and trends in order to make business decisions, prioritize resources, and allocate funding. The 99% needs a more accurate understanding of how the system works and fails. Design for the 99%.

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