User fixingmedaybyday on Reddit came up with "Agilecadabra" to describe management thinking that if they use the word "agile" without changing anything else it magically makes people complete tasks quickly, and I love it and am stealing it right now.

Cuckoo ducks (animal) An obligate brood parasite which lays its eggs in seagulls' nests. They don't hurt other eggs; they just get in the way and take advantage of others' care. (software devlopment) Jira tickets that got bodged into your team's epic because it's less work than creating a new one.

New blog post: A third conversational pattern in BDD: lizkeogh.com/2026/01/23/a... - Interaction Questioning: “Given the behaviour that results in the outcome, is there any point where a human should confirm choices or decisions being made?”

A Third Conversational Pattern in BDD

It’s been a moment! COVID disrupted a lot of things, not least my writing. More recently I’ve been busy with my new employment with the amazing Assent, focusing on sustainability in sup…

lizkeogh.com

When Cloudflare goes down but you still remember how to program without Copilot

a small kitten is standing on its hind legs looking at the camera

Alt: A small kitten dancing on its hind legs

media.tenor.com

This is awesome. Listening to Lake District Radio - DJ Lee Durrant is playing for 24 hours (from 8am GMT) in protest against the sewage being dumped into the lakes. He's only playing songs that made it to "number two" in the UK charts :D bsky.app/profile/radi...

RadioToday - UK & Ireland@handle.invalid · 10mo ago

Lee Durrant takes on 24 hours of chart “Number 2s” on Lake District Radio to raise awareness of water pollution during Our Earth Week

Tried to find the page documenting my main No Man's Sky base. I do also play Palworld. This is hilarious.

Software devs solve problems that haven’t been solved before, or solve them in new contexts; otherwise we’d be buying (or open sourcing) solutions. When AI solves problems that don’t come from its training data set, I’ll worry about my mortgage. Until then it’s great for the other stuff. Mostly.

AI is super-helpful, especially when we tread on someone else's specialist turf to get things done. But it still takes a human to help you check / test the work, and AIs can't tell you who the right person is to do that, or reach out to them for you. As ever, the hardest problems in SW are human.

Specialisms in modern SW means that we have to work with each other: to over-communicate, relentlessly clarify priorities, work as a team-of-teams when they shift, create and clean up docs, and it's always messy no matter how hard you try. Katherine Kirk calls it "the entanglement of entanglement."

It's been eye-opening getting "back to the coal face". The complexity of modern software development is mind-boggling. Back in 2000 one person could reasonably hold the whole of an Enterprise website plus services in their head having spent a year or so on it. Now we necessarily have specialisms.

I stumbled across this essay as I was falling asleep last night, and left myself multiple emphatic reminders to remember to circle back to it today. "The joy we're about to lose...we'll become overseers rather than creators, managers rather than builders." annievella.com/posts/the-so...

We need Wranglers + Engineers. medium.com/mapai/from-f...

From Fair Haven to Technomic Empires.

Why the fuss about conversational programming? Part IV

medium.com

This seems like a good time to remind folks of what Hannah Arendt once wrote:

What gets me about the Signal chat isn't the chat itself. It's that nobody can answer the question: "What other information has been compromised?" This will not be the only thread, possibly not the only leak, and anything > 4 weeks old is deleted. They have no idea what they leaked, to who.

@RonJeffries.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy Just found my copy of Kate Oneal's "The Mythical Italian Restaurant" which you gave me as a gift the first time we met (Agile 2005?) for my clumsy explanation of BDD to you and Chet. Finding it today made me smile - thank you!

Don’t ask Amazon Q Developer to put code under test for you. It thinks you’re trying to “put it under”, refuses, and directs you to the Responsible AI Policy instead.

Newsletter: Our digital lives are unregulated growth-hacked ecological disasters. The modern tech ecosystem's growth-at-all-costs mindset is actively harming billions of people, pushing them toward authoritarianism for profit. We must fight back. www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Never Forgive Them

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting wor...

wheresyoured.at

Wow, the Cynefin.io wiki has come a long way since I last looked at it! This page on the vector theory of change is really concise and has a great example of dispositional landscapes: cynefin.io/wiki/Vector_... - would love to pass this on to change agents everywhere!

Main Page

The cynefin.io, Naturalising Sense-Making wiki that almost anyone can edit.

cynefin.io

Here's a puzzle. How do y'all work out what data you need from your users and data constraints, alongside your emergent product, when you can't get the data later if you didn't get it from the get-go and you can't put data constraints in if the data is already a mess? What should I read / watch?

Had a lot of conversations this year about Doug Hubbard's method of calibrating estimation confidence - found a great write-up of it here. Next time they ask you for an estimate, ask what level of confidence they're looking for! www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/11/11/a...

A simple way to improve your estimating (and a cool pub trick) – Conclusion

…and we’re back! Well… that was a long commercial break wasn’t it :-) In case you missed part 1 of our version of the show “deal or no deal”, you missed the big cliff-hanger and you really should r…

cleverworkarounds.com

This seemed inevitable to me after just a couple of weeks evaluating GPT-4 and previous versions. First rule of reality: it's *always* an S-curve. garymarcus.substack.com/p/confirmed-...

CONFIRMED: LLMs have indeed reached a point of diminishing returns

Science, sociology, and the likely financial collapse of the Generative AI bubble

garymarcus.substack.com

@lunivore.bsky.social coined the term 'sadlines' and i think it's revolutionary.

Can you imagine going to a restaurant and yelling at the waitress to bring your food faster, following her around the room shrieking at her and when she finally sets your in meal in front of you, sniffing it and walking outside. MY CAT CAN

12 years later and Cynefin for everyone is still such a useful post. Thanks @lunivore.bsky.social lizkeogh.com/cynefin-for-...

Cynefin for Everyone!

Five years ago, around Christmas 2012, I wrote an article about Cynefin, the sensemaking framework. I focused it on software development, because that was the main industry I worked in, and particular...

lizkeogh.com

Optimist: the cup is 1/2 full Pessimist: the cup is 1/2 empty Excel: the cup is January 2nd

The National Gallery in London is renovating its Sainsbury Wing and they’ve just found a secret letter from one of the original donors, sunk into a concrete column, saying that he hates the columns and is glad they’re being demolished. 10/10 unhinged rich man behaviour, no notes

wrote a thing idly after the kids went to bed

I'm watching some folks reverse engineer the xz backdoor, sharing some *preliminary* analysis with permission. The hooked RSA_public_decrypt verifies a signature on the server's host key by a fixed Ed448 key, and then passes a payload to system(). It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable.

Filippo Valsorda@filippo.abyssdomain.expert · 2y ago

This might be the best executed supply chain attack we've seen described in the open, and it's a nightmare scenario: malicious, competent, authorized upstream in a widely used library. Looks like this got caught by chance. Wonder how long it would have taken otherwise.