One hacker way

Agile and Scrum have been widely used buzzwords in software development for many years. One Hacker Way, a Rational Alternative to Agile Presented at Reaktor Dev Day 2014 is a brilliant talk on modern software development practices and need to change them. Erik Meijer was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the Reactive programming framework for .NET.

“Agile is a cancer that we need to eliminate from the industry.” Alright, Erik Meijer, you certainly know how to start a good rant. Here is the video of the talk One Hacker Way – Erik Meijer (worth to watch for 45 minutes):

You have to give respect for Erik Meijer because he is in the arena, writing code, debugging, etc. Watch as Dr. Meijer rants and raves and pants and sweats and storms around the stage emitting more lunacy than a normal human brain can hold. He’s the hellfire and brimstone preacher.

You can agree many things said on the talk. In the talk on some parts he’s pretty much describing the Agile Manifesto and Principles, and the principles of Lean. When addressing the problems of agile, he is mostly addressing Scrum, the clusterfuck which has become synonymous with Agile, but has clearly gone to far. Erik Meijer proposes One Hacker Way as a Rational Alternative to Agile. But is he really serious on that proposition?

I’ve realized that Dr. Meijer is just totally brilliant. Why? According to One Hacker Way! block posting the THE REASON is that he’s just pulled off the perfect hoax! There are parts on the speech that could be considered as perfect hoax. Feel the man’s passion and enthusiasm as he exhorts his listeners. Keep listening! Listen to that crowd. Listen as they accept what he’s saying.

I think it’s a pretty good rant, because the problem in our industry is that we like Silver Bullets. The talk describes the human tendency to cargo-cult the fuck out of things (CCTFOOT™): very time someone comes out with an approach that has, as its core, that you SHOULD BE EVIDENCE BASED, and you SHOULD ITERATE AND IMPROVE PRACTICES, instead we cargo-cult out of whatever the guru wrote, and we stop being EVIDENCE BASED and we stop iterating.

The speech with show you passion in preaching, entertain you and make you think. That’s why this One Hacker Way talk is well is worth of the time (45 minutes). Keep in mind that this speech was given at seminar organized by company that sells agile coaching services. According to Erik Meijer “Software is eating the world” and “everything will eventually be software, even hardware.“

Meijer is all for a low hierarchy, because hierarchical systems tend to work. A working system contains three layers: the developers that hack, managers that set the context within which developers do what they feel is best and senior leadership that takes care of the strategy.