For years I’ve dabbled in & out of Buddhism. Many of the core concepts (no-self, impermanence, meditation as a path to liberation, the fundamental “oneness” of all things, meaning that us & everything around us is comprised of atoms & energy that cycle around & reform into different structures that we place labels & concepts on with our minds) make sense to me. And yet every time I dive into it, I’ve never lasted more than a few weeks, and I think I know why…

Every time I’ve thrown myself at a Buddhist practice, I’ve gone in full force. Long…

Any iRacing user with more than a dozen races under their belt has probably been crashed out of races quite a few times, often times as the victim of situations that ocellate between genuine racing incidents & full-on malice-fueled attacks. iRacing attempts to reduce these incidents through the safety rating & license systems, preventing you from racing faster cars until you’ve raised your safety rating to a high enough level (by not accruing incident points through hitting things & going off the track) & “proving” that you’re capable of racing cleanly around others. Unfortunately far too many incidents are caused…

With a new year comes a new challenge, and with the dawn of 2020 comes my new role of a Developer Chapter Lead, or DCL. Through hard work, passion, and a love of software people I’ve been chosen as one of the first in my organization to take on this exciting new role. This is what I’ve discovered in my first 90 days.

For Context — What is a Developer Chapter Lead? What is a Chapter? What the Heck are you Talking About!?

A chapter is a group of professionals from various cross-functional teams that embody the same role in their day-to-day life. There can be chapters for developers, designers, scrum masters, product owners, you name it. Their whole purpose…

When we first start writing code, many of us will find ourselves falling into one of two camps. One focuses on the code itself, considering clean, intelligent, modern code to be the ultimate goal, with working software as the happy byproduct. The other focuses on the software we’re making & it’s place in the world, considering code as merely a tool to solve issues & execute on visions.

As a young gung-ho developer I very much exemplified the latter. I got into software to solve the world’s problems, and code seemed like the best medium for me to do so…

Scrum is claimed to do many things. Create awesome software in no time, immediately turn average teams into unstoppable juggernauts, cure cancer, etc.

In reality, Scrum doesn’t do anything. It’s simply a framework to help teams handle complex projects prone to change. I think of Scrum as simply shining a few different types of light on projects and development teams.

Scrum is a Flashlight

The first retro I ever ran didn’t go so well. As a young, wide-eyed developer-playing-ScrumMaster 3 months out of college, I burst into the room 30 minutes early to set up my grand vision of whiteboard columns, flipcharts, and sticky…

The Journey

To be fair, I was never an “elite” runner. Freshman & sophomore years of high school I was one of the slowest kids on one of the fastest X-C teams in the state, which means I usually finished around mid-pack in races. I trained my butt off every season, but rarely broke the 20 minute 5k mark, while my teammates were finishing sub-16. Eventually I got sick of this, and junior year I gave the lower 50% of racers a chance by hanging up racing flats for golf clubs, since I was actually good at golf and practice didn’t hurt…

While serving as Scrum Master for much of last year, I had more than a few mini-existential crisis-es. Not the run-of-the-mill nihilistic ones that have served as a near-keynote to our 21st century, but ones surrounding the purpose of process in software. I put hours-upon-hours into this role, and yet I had nothing concrete to show for it. No working software made by “Scrum”, and no proof that Scrum has helped my team deliver value. Though incredibly rewarding, my role didn’t provide the direct feedback I’ve come to expect as a developer. It was hard to know which actions worked…

Renowned 21st century philosopher Jake the Dog put it best:

“Dude, sucking at sumthin’ is the first step towards being sorta good at something.”

But our ego doesn’t want to believe this. We like being right. We like being experts. Conversely, we hate feeling incompetent or upstaged.

Worse still, software developers exist in a world where knowledge & capabilities are king. What we know & what we can do roughly equals our professional earning power. Being wrong or clueless about something seemingly knocks us down the proverbial totem pole.

So whenever someone questions our decision, points out our mistake, or…