Presentation: #LearningIsHorrible, and Other Harsh Realities
Location:
- Whittle, 3rd flr.
Duration
Day of week:
- Wednesday
Abstract
It is an implicit reality of the Agile Manifesto that we need to accept being wrong, yet people hate to be wrong. I’ve asked lots of rooms of lots of people to describe what it feels like to be wrong, and the response fall into a narrow range: Embarrassing. Depressing. Humiliating. All sort of variations on Bad.
This is an existential challenge to Agile. If there's anything people can agree on about the agile manifesto is that it is about people, and about the inability to perfectly predict the future. It gets worse: "bad" is not what being wrong feels like. Being wrong feels great! That’s because being wrong feels exactly like being right. What feels terrible is when you learn you were wrong. But if I ask these same people if they like to learn, they claim that they do, even though they just describe the feeling of learning as horrible. What’s going on here? To be a fully capable member of an agile team — learning, communicating, and collaborating — means overcoming the harsh realities that work against us. We are subject to many cognitive biases, predictable gaps between perception and reality. We have limited cognitive energy. We are adept at spotting mistakes in others that we are blind to in ourselves. You might attend this talk if you are curious how human psychology works against successful agile adoption. But my real goal is to change your behavior. My experience is that seeking excellence in agile development requires difficult emotional work. I will challenge you to reconsider your accountability for failure and frustration, and invite you to establish the habits and patterns that can lay the groundwork for success. They are simple, but not easy. Are you up for it?
Tracks
Covering innovative topics
Monday, 7 March
-
Back to Java
What to expect in Java 9 and Spring 5
-
Stream Processing @ Scale
Big data, fast-moving data. Practical implementation lessons on Real-time Data
-
DevOps & CI/CD
Lessons/stories on optimizing the deployment pipeline
-
Head-to-Tail Functional Languages
Free-range Monads, Tackling immutability, tales from production, and more...
-
Architecting for Failure
Your system will fail. Take control before it takes you with it
-
21st Century Culture from Geeks on the Ground
New ways to organise technology companies and workplace culture
Tuesday, 8 March
-
Architectures You've Always Wondered about
In-depth technical case studies from giants like: Microsoft, Netflix, Google, Twitter, and more...
-
Close to the Metal
Get efficiency back into your code, concepts like: cache efficient algorithm and lock free data structures
-
Containers (in production)
Real-world lessons on scalability and reliability in production container deployments
-
Modern CS in the real world
Real-world Industry adoption of modern CS ideas
-
Security, Incident Response & Fraud Detection
Master-level classes on building security into your system and responding to incidents when things go wrong.
-
Optimizing You
Keeping life in balance is always a challenge. Learning lifehacks
Wednesday, 9 March
-
Disrupting Finance
Technology advances in finance (blockchain, P2P, Machine Learning, API's)
-
Modern Native Languages
Modern native languages: Safe efficiency with Go, Rust, Swift
-
Full Stack Javascript
Level up Javascript with topics like Angular, React/ReactNative, Node, Mongo/Couch/Other, Falcor, GraphQL, etc
-
Data Science & Machine Learning Methods
A developer's data science and machine learning toolkit
-
Microservices for Mega-Architectures
Practical lessons on Microservices success.
-
Modern Agile Development
Revisiting Agile today and tackling challenges we are seeing in the wild