Software Design: Tidy First?

Randy Shoup set out to be an international lawyer. He studied in West Berlin when there was still a wall around it, spent a year at Stanford Law, and had what should have been the perfect summer internship on Sand Hill Road. Instead he spent it watching inventors light up whiteboards with brilliant ideas — then being told his job was just to write them down. That summer broke something open. He went back to Oracle that fall and never looked back.

“We’re accumulating code faster than we are accumulating trust.” Sometimes a phrase just hits. Yes, we can create code faster now, but software is bipedal—code & trust go together. One without the other just hops along awkwardly. Trust is as tricky as code. Both are asymmetrical. Code works or it doesn’t. One mistake in a long string of good decisions is the same as just a mistake. Trust accumulates slowly & evaporates in an instant.

Playback speed × Share post Share post at current time Share from 0:00 0:00 / Transcript Genie Lessons from Genie Sessions: Prose as a Programming Language Kent sits down with one of the founders of OpenProse to talk through their method of prose as a programming language. This session is sponsored by OpenProse. More on them below — they're also the reason we're here.

This stuck in my craw at the time Patrick published it but I didn’t have the energy to respond. Now, with the ever-increasing, genie-fueled emphasis on speed, it deserves a second look. Among its several flaws as a statement is that it misses one point that XP got right, a point that’s become leveraged. I’ll start gently, addressing the OP directly. Responsibility I don’t like the tone. Who exactly hired The Slow (may as well be honest & capitalize)?

Michael Grinich has an unusual vantage point, his company powers enterprise infrastructure for hundreds of companies, so he sees how the AI transition is actually playing out across the industry, not just in the headlines.What he’s noticing: the whole ecosystem is accelerating, not just the AI companies. And most people are misreading what kind of moment this is.

Welcome! I am going to pass on to you the secret to a successful and brief noobitude, and I won’t even keep you in suspense: nobody cares how many tasks you complete. Why not, and what we care about instead are the subject of the rest of this essay. Look at your situation from our perspective (by “our” I mean “older engineers”). We hired a bunch of people like you. Some of y’all (we’ll call them A’s) will be amazing game-changers, making everyone around them wildly more productive.

Unstick your stuck thinking. The organizing committee is offering you half off attending Thinkies World Congress II next Wednesday, 0800-1100 Pacific time. Come learn about Thinkies, apply them, share what you learn, & attending the amazing closing panel on creativity. Use the discount code BreakTheStuck for 50% off the (already modest, if I do say so myself) ticket.

I came across the following example & I wanted to write about it but I realized it was a good example of a Thinkie & I haven’t written about thiat Thinkie yet so here it is. Whew! Quite the opening sentence. Transformation: Look at the problem in its wider context. What are the “sources & uses” (…

I saw a post on the changing build/buy/customize tradeoff & thought, “I should weigh in. The XP world has been grappling with this for decades.” I dug in. Figured out the tradeoff curves. Speculated how they would change. It’s a pretty good framework, I think. I learned things putting it together. (There I go with the Boomer Ellipsis thing…) I looked …

Angie Jones spent years as the "geek whisperer" — translating technical possibility into human progress. Then she led one of the most ambitious AI adoption programs in the industry, and the rug got pulled out. Now at the Agentic AI Foundation, she's working to make sure the standards powering the next era of software are built in the open, by everyone.