THE FAILURE OF FOCUS

We know that in our landscape of people and technology, aiming for a particular outcome doesn’t always lead to us getting what we want. Sometimes the best results come from approaching a problem obliquely. But in Agile our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software. We like to start with the outcome, meet the needs of our users, delivering high-quality working software with happy teams and true agility… but how might that focus be holding us back, and what are the alternatives?

In this talk we look at some different strategies for approaching complex ecosystems, starting from where we are right now, and allowing innovation to emerge through obliquity, naivety, and serendipity.

We’re waiting for confirmation on Kevlin’s keynote. Check back soon for more!

PLAIN WRONG?

I love writing JavaScript. The trouble is, so does everyone else. When people aren’t writing JavaScript, they’re usually writing frameworks for writing JavaScript in JavaScript. In fact, most of the JavaScript that’s around these days seems to either be written for, or within, a JavaScript flavor like React, Vue, or Angular. Frameworks make writing your own code faster and more ergonomic, but they do not come without problems. Code written with Framework A depends on the environment Framework A provides in order to work — and this dependency often represents a lot of code to transmit, decompress, parse, and compile. What about ‘plain’ JavaScript? Is it always naïve to think anything worthwhile can still be achieved just writing some straight-up code? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer, because the line between plain and flavored JavaScript is kind of blurry. It’s also not clear who should be the ones to get to write JavaScript, for what reasons, or when. But there’s no doubt the little we do as web developers is often done with much more than we need.