Retrospectives are probably the most important software development practice. They build a culture of continuous improvement. We may fail, but we’ll learn and do better next time. (Or, at, least, fail differently.)

The most common retrospective practice revolves around some variation of these three questions:

• “What went well?”
• “What could have gone better?”
• “What we should we differently next time?”

I want to suggest adding a fourth question:

• “Where did we get lucky? What could/should have failed, but didn’t?”

Sometimes, we do stupid things or take needless risks, but it turns out fine. This can be super-dangerous: we run the risk of learning the wrong lesson — that the mistake or risk was acceptable. We decide it’s OK repeat the dangerous practice because, hey, it worked out last time!

Welcome to FictionalSoft! I hope your first week is going well? Great.

As you start to find your feet, I want to make sure we have a shared understanding of what success looks like here. Apologies in advance if I’m telling you something you already know, but it’s important to be explicit about this early.

You were hired to write code. Many developers make the mistake and think that their job stops there. That’s not true. In fact, you have two jobs:

My co-worker Eric Mill recently brought up the topic of psychological safety. Referencing a study by Google that points to psychological safety as a key factor in successful teams, Eric wrote:

Maybe these situations sounds familiar to others (they definitely both are to me):

Did you feel like you could ask what the goal was without the risk of sounding like you’re the only one out of the loop? Or did you opt for continuing without clarifying anything, in order to avoid being perceived as someone who is unaware?

Rusty Russell — a hacker I admire greatly — writes:

“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot.”

This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy. Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software means you’ll encounter such people. You may have to work with them. You may have to argue with them (and they may be right).

I swear, sometimes this programming thing is really just the digital equivalent of baling twine and duct tape.

If you happen to be watching 6News in Lawrence last night, you’d have seen the election results crawling across the bottom of the screen:

Pretty much par for the course in terms of local TV coverage… but do you have any idea how that information gets there?

Let me break it down: