text stringlengths 0 884 |
|---|
**Jessica Kerr:** Oh, sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's say like Uber, for example; a large system. I'm just thinking out loud. |
**Jessica Kerr:** Yeah, I don't know how Uber's system works, but it also depends where you are in Uber. For instance, if your team works on -- let's go with a piece I can see, the mobile app... Then you need to understand, from the outside in, generally how ride-sharing works and what the point is. And then at a lower... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Jessica Kerr:** \[07:57\] You need to understand how iPhones work - if you're on an iPhone app - enough, and you need a good understanding of your programming language. But the most important thing is what your system is trying to accomplish, the business domain, and how the different pieces fit together. And I think... |
**Jerod Santo:** So I can see as a single developer of a team, it's easy to get in your particular vertical (for a lack of a better--) like your little sub-system, and understand that intimately, and know where every line of code is. |
**Jessica Kerr:** I wouldn't say that's easy. That's not easy. That's really hard. It's easy only when you wrote it. If you've been on that team for 15 years, okay; but that's because you wrote a lot of those lines of code, and you were there for their creation. But if you join a team, that kind of intimacy is incredib... |
Transferring that mental model of how the pieces fit together, where everything is... The hardest part of writing code, even before naming - you have to decide where to put that code, and that's hard. And it matters. So transferring that mental model is way harder than you think it is. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what are some ways that people do it? You've got documentation, you've got in-line comments, you've got tutorials... |
**Jessica Kerr:** Yeah, yeah, you think that helps... None of those help nearly as much as you think they do. Because when you write that documentation, it says exactly what you meant, in your head, to you. But the people coming in don't have the same context. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, what do you do then? You sit them down, and "Let me tell you a story. 15 years ago..." |
**Jessica Kerr:** That helps, actually, yes. Getting the history of the system is hugely helpful. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jessica Kerr:** You'd be surprised how much those old stories make the names in the code make sense, for instance. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Jessica Kerr:** And then you don't look at it and go like "God, who wrote this crap?" You go "Oh, I see that previous circumstance that was a constraint, and that I heard about 10 years ago. I know they've broken it now, so I know it's okay to fix it now." |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. It's like, every bad decision in code was a good decision that just didn't age well. Or it obsolete now. Like, "Well, that had a reason... There's a reason that line's there." It probably is obtuse to you. You have no idea why it's there. |
**Jessica Kerr:** Right. But the person who wrote it then, in the time - not that person now; that's a different person... But yeah, it made sense to them. It worked. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. This idea of story is pretty interesting, because we just covered this on Brain Science, a future show coming out... It's probably out by the time this podcast is out there. It's called "The Power of Story." And it's more like the context... So think of your favorite movie where there's a vill... |
**Jessica Kerr:** Yeah, you can reimagine a future that includes that person constructively. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:03\] Yeah. I like this idea of fireside chats, or campfire chats, or whatever, around "This is why our system is the way it is." That would make sense to me. Is that a thing? Do people do that often in teams? |
**Jessica Kerr:** That's why going out for beer is often very helpful, because it's over beers that you talk about how things are the way they are, and how they used to be, and you tell the story of that incident that you still have scars from, organizational scars... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** True. |
**Jessica Kerr:** The other thing that helps is pairing. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Jessica Kerr:** And see, both of these things, like you pointed out - when you hear the story, you can kind of put yourself in that character's place... It's through experience that we learn, and it's through shared experience that we converge our mental models and our vocabularies and our viewpoints of the world. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't wanna give too much of this show away, and it's not the point, but Dr. Mireille Reece, my co-host on that show - she unpacks some research around how we learn differently (better, essentially), through stories. The way it connects information, the way emotions are invoked, that emotion respo... |
**Jessica Kerr:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** It seems like putting a lot on ourselves, or a lot on developers, where it's like, it's hard enough to get the stinking computer to do the thing you want it to do, but then you also have to be a storyteller, and a beer-drinker perhaps... |
**Jessica Kerr:** Yeah, you have to be human! |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's asking too much, Jessica. Come on! |
**Jessica Kerr:** \[laughs\] Because every human is a storyteller. You don't have to drink beer, you do have to drink some sort of liquid. That's also part of being human. And interacting with each other is part of being human, which -- I mean, Lord knows, we're feeling that these days... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When your job is making the system, and all you wanna do is make the system, and not have to be the everyday human, that's tough though, right? |
**Jessica Kerr:** Well, your system isn't just the software, that's the thing. Just like you need to understand not just the code, how the code works together, you need to understand how it deploys, because that's the way you change it. And our job isn't writing code or designing code, it's designing change in the syst... |
**Jerod Santo:** How can we achieve that? |
**Jessica Kerr:** We do that naturally, as people, when we talk to each other. It's just that we think that's not productive, but actually -- you know, when I go into the office for eight hours, way back in the day when I got to go to an office... I've been remote for a while, and-- |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You're feeling it. |
**Jessica Kerr:** Well, yeah, because just this year I decided I don't wanna be remote anymore, and that didn't work out... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It backfired on you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Bad timing, yeah... |
**Jessica Kerr:** But sometimes when I'm working from home, and after six hours I'm just "Sigh... I didn't actually work. I only worked six hours." Well, I never work more than six hours in the office... That would be a lot, actually, of work to get done. But the thing is, those in-between times, we happen to usually t... |
**Jerod Santo:** Those micro-moments. |
**Jessica Kerr:** Yeah. What we don't realize is forming those relationships is our work. That builds a company. Avdi pointed out the other day - a company is a structure that's made of relationships with people that collectively forms a capability to do something. But those relationships matter, and that's how we tran... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:12\] It is the relationship and the interaction process built up of many parts though. The documentation obviously plays a role, because people read it... |
**Jessica Kerr:** It can help. It can help. But it never conveys as much as you think it does. |
**Jerod Santo:** It can't tell that full story. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what are the building blocks of this that you advocate for? Is it like docs + relationship, or is it docs + beer + relationship? If you had to give a list of "Do these things right, and you get these relationships and trust-building to happen..." |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.