Harry's Ruminations

I've been a software developer throughout the "Agile Revolution."  My first team lead, back in 2001 said these words to me and I've always taken them to heart: I think the world's pretty done with us [Software Developers].  I feel like we've got about 5 years to get our act together or that's it. Apropos, that same year a highly influential group of practitioners signed the Agile Manifesto .   Amid waves of Dot-Com-Bubble-Bursting, offshoring, and right-sizing, they kept it simple:  Here's what works; apply liberally. That was 14 years ago.  In the intervening time, much like Protestantism after Luther, factions emerged:  eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework.  Characteristically, 25-year-old me thought these were all leaps forward.   At 36-and-a-half, my cynicism grows: I've seen Agile roll-out to 1000+ developers in 2 world-wide organization across different corporate and civic cultures.  I'll gladly replace Sisyph...

Ecclesiastes is Solomon's valediction as an old man.  From the purported wisest man that ever lived--gifted with wisdom from God Himself --comes a book that seems a real downer on the hollowness of nearly every pursuit in his hedonistic life. Sometimes, having worked as a developer for 16 years, I'm reminded off Ecclesiastes. With apologies to Solomon: To everything there is a season:   A time to build big, and a time to build small,   A time to write, and lots more time to sustain,   A time to break systems apart,   A time to pull systems together. A time to delete, and a time to merge. Most telling is the author's refrain:  "All is vanity! There is nothing new under the sun." It doesn't discourage me, but it does make me think:  Is this worth rewriting/redoing, or should I just use something off-the-shelf?  The thrill of just writing everything myself is gone, replaced by the understanding that whatever I write is more "mental s...