The one about estimates

Other: "How long will this take?"
You: "I don't know"
Other: "It's just a button like the other"
You: "I know it looks like the other button but there's a whole different list of things to consider"
Other: "But I need costs to prioritise"
You: "I understand, and I wish I could help you. You know I won't lower quality and you don't want scope being reduced... in that case time is an open variable."
Other: "Not again with the triangle thing. You've done that a thousand times, that's jour profession".

(pause for drama)

You: "Ok. Let's play this game. I've already told you about scope-quality-time, right?"
Other: "Yes"
You: "Ok, John/Jane/MrSmith... do you have kids?"
Other: "Uuuh. Yes. How is that related?"

You: "Ok, let's imagine I asked how long will it take you to bath, feed and put to sleep tonight. I need to know so we can skype with Australia".
Other: "Uuuh... well, If we have to skype I can have my significant other to do it"

You: "Don't be a chicken. Give me the time when the kid will be bathed, belly-full and wonderfuly asleep"

Other: "9pm"

You: "exactly 9pm?"
Other: "9-ish"

You: "and bathroom is cleaned, kitchen is all cleaned up too, right? No traces of food on the wall or ceiling, right?"

Other: "Ok, maybe 9.30"

You: "9 or 9.30. You mentioned you start your routines at 7.30 so you just admitted to a 30% potential deviation."
Other: "err..."

You: "But you do this everyday. Ok, forget about tonight. Let me ask you something different. What time will your kid be at kindergarten tomorrow?"
Other: "8.30 sharp"

You: "not 8.35?"
Other: "No, 8.30 or they have shut the door"

You: "And the kid was perfectly dressed and ate everything you prepared for breakfast, right?"
Other: "Well, not always."

You: "No traces of food on the wall or ceiling, right? Bed is made and there's no breakfast utensils laying around."
Other: "We have to make it to the 8.30 deadline"

You: "But you do this every day. It's you field of expertise. Daily repetition, same tools, same team, same risks, ..."
Other: "yeahs, but kids... entropy."

You: "Daily repetition, same tools, same team, same risks, ... I don't deal with any of those simplifications. Plus I also get entropy, arguably smaller than the entropy generated by kids or toddlers, but entropy nonetheless."
Other: "Ok, but how long will this take?"



Special thanks to Roger Segura and Yorgo Saslis, their parenthood inspired this story. 
DISCLAIMER: None of them are The Other in the story, they just happened to tell personal experiences that helped building the script.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

My current go-to material on micro-Services

#kudos Graham Lea

JCrete 2014

This post is, sort of, a reply to Geertjan’s post about JCrete (https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/jcrete_2014).

Geertjan describes a group of trees and paths and a river and (purposely or not) lacks to mention he’s describing a forest. It’s great to have people with Geertjan’s reach to present and support this way of organising conferences, but I’d like to give my two cents on the subject.

Before continuing, let me say what Geertjan didn’t: "JCrete is a conference that uses Open Space Technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology)”. A description like that is usually simplified as “FOO is an Open Space”. Hmm! We got rid of ’technology' and ‘conference’. 

I’m still surprised to see the amount of people still unfamiliar with OpenSpace Technolgy, but that’s probably because we’ve been using a lot in Barcelona (more on that later), therefore I'm the weird one. As Dmitry said during the wrap-up, this format should be used all around and I completely agree to that. 

But! I think wide adoption of Open Space Technology is still not possible, or that it should happen slowly.

Open Spaces don’t scale well. Even in JCrete things changed comparing 2012 edition and 2014. There were twice as many attendees and I’d say the number of people familiar with Open Space Technology is and how to *use it* remained the same (thus decreasing the %).

While preparing the main room on Sunday evening, some of the un-organizers and I went for a round gathering of chairs. That mutated the day after into a semi-circle around the screen the following days. Ok, we need to see code, it’s true. But then I noticed all rooms ended up in a similar layout. We are still too wired for the sit-and-listen conference format and unlearning this takes time.

In Agile Barcelona there’s been an open space every 6 months for the last few years. That led to some other communities (AngularJS, Java Hispano, Bcn Dev Con,…) to adopt it. The results are usually the same: people unfamiliar with the format, even when it’s explained (including 4 principles and law) still don’t grok it. 

Open Space Technology is easy to explain but hard to use.

I think one of the reasons why people get so surprised in JCrete is because it’s an Open Space, not a Conference. What I’m trying to say here is that when a conference was publicised as a using Open Space Technology, attendees should only hear the ‘Open Space’ part. Actually, it might be a good thing to just use the two terms separately: Conference vs Open Space. These are not exclusive terms though. It’s possible to have the two mixed up: plain-old-cfp-talks-in-slots during the morning and open spaces during the afternoon (see for instance ALE 2014 program http://ale2014.alenetwork.eu/ale14-program/ ).

But I agree with Geertjan on that (1) morning open space followed by (2) at-the-beach, spontaneous sessions in the afternoon followed by (3) wonderful share-all food is plain genius. 

PS: I was really surprised to see talks popup out of nowhere and happen on the so-called 'room 5' (see first picture of  Geertjan’s post) as that is actually the ultimate ‘Open Space’.