I led a two-hour writing workshop this past weekend. The attendees ranged from a 9-year-old who says, “I LOVE to write,” to retired adults who are involved in community projects who hate to write. We performed two writing exercises. Although the writing is useful, it’s the debrief of each writing activity that helps each writer […]
Last week we held the AYE conference. Attending bloggers (in random order) were: Ron Pihlgren, Esther Derby, James Bach, Don Gray, Steve Smith, Tim Bacon, Rachel Davies, Dave Hoover, Dave Pickett, and Dave Liebreich. I hope I didn’t forget anyone. One of the highlights for me was the writing workshop. We practiced several timed writing
Read “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”, and when you’re done chuckling, note the necessary ideas: His point #5: throw away reference books. This works for all first drafts. I don’t care if you’re writing a novel, a spec, or code. It works. Interrupting flow and what do you
Esther‘s here this week (again), so we can finish the pre-review draft of the book. We’re telling the story of a great manager who’s just arrived to a new organization. We describe meetings ,where we wanted to say “Everyone nodded.” I wanted to add “like bobble-headed dolls.” While that’s humorous, it’s not very respectful to
Esther and I have been editing the management book this week. We’re pairing to edit also – one keyboard, one file, two heads. It’s exhausting and fun. Here are things I’ve learned this week: We don’t have the same default ways to write — and that’s ok. The manuscript is richer for us talking
Esther and I are working together this week, starting over again with the management book. This time, we’re pair-writing, and it worked surprisingly well today. We collaborate — and we have conflict, where the person at the keyboard says, “Oh no, I’m not writing that down.” However, we worked until about 5:30 today, when
Just in case you hadn’t heard enough from me about inch-pebbles, here’s an article I wrote for Computerworld.com. Bloglet readers, it’s possible I have finally convinced Bloglet there’s nothing wrong with my blog. You’ve missed a couple of weeks worth of postings. Sorry about that.
In this issue of Better Software, I have the featured article, No More Second Class Testers! and Frank Patrick has a great article, “Promises and Prescriptions, How the Theory of Constraints can help cure common project ailments.” I can’t give you a URL to Frank’s article, but maybe in a month or so he’ll
Last week at the AYE conference, Naomi Karten and I facilitated a writing workshop. We ask people to write for five minutes and then for ten minutes. We find that people who are stuck on their writing make significant progress in five or ten minutes. However, we need to set our expectations low — very
I’m a big fan of managers admitting their mistakes. (It’s one of the lessons I learned early as a manager.) I take that seriously, seriously enough that when someone found a glaring error in my last SD column, Future Fixes, I asked the editor let me publish a correction and I sent in replacement text