Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Have you ever wondered if what you build has the right impact on the customers? Engineering is often demanded to be on time and cost-effective.  Bugs and incidents are known for disrupting the customer experience. Less bugs, the better; fewer incidents, the better. So when do we reduce bugs and incidents? Devops has an interesting practice called Blameless Incident Reviews  (BIR). Considering the devops culture and movement, blameless incident reviews are great because they drive the right culture shift from feat and blame to sharing and understanding. BIR is often pull-based, which happens when we have a number of production bugs that are worth sharing and driving lessons learned to the whole org. Devops is all about better ways of building and operating software. We cannot do better if we are stuck with the same practices all the time; practices need to be changing and evolving and a way to keep us fresh and learning at all times.

  Shape up is the new Basecamp book(former 37 signals). It's about product discovery. A book is a form or flavor of Dual Track agile . Is pretty interesting because it also blends with some Lean Startup ideas. 37signals/Basecamp was always an interesting company since they did not fit on the classical enterprise-like company neither typical silicon valley company. The books are often culture-heavy and show how they do business. This book is about product development, Discovery, Dual-Track agile, and a different way to manage scope. Basecamp explores the flexibility of Scope which to give them credit not often is explored. The book also shows obvious XP reference by tracking progress with Big visible charts and using lots of visuals to avoid heavy unrealistic planning. ShapeUp is cool but we also need to keep in mind they have executive buy-in since they literally run the company and do not rely on VC/Seed money, so this gives them the ultimate flexibility. Today I made a slide ca...

Jupyter Notebooks are very popular in the Big Data / Data Science field. Notebooks are a great tool for discovery it allows us to have interactive code and abstract the runtime environment. Notebooks are sharable and are cool not only on the Big Data / Data Science landscape but also for anyone who wants to write better documentation, have better code examples for your consumers, or even just to learn pretty much anything. Jupyter notebooks are written in Python however is possible to install other Kernels for other languages like Java, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Go, Rust, and many more. Github knows how to read Jupiter notebook files and provides great visualization for you.  So today I made a short video showing some Jupyter capabilities across multiples kernels. 

Agile is +20 years old. Most of the companies did not get it. I'm glad to see the several new UX movements are getting it and are producing some amazing books, not limited to UX but in the helm of digital products and discovery like: Sense & Respond , Outcomes Over Output , The Hard Things about Hard Things  and Traction . I read all these books and really recommend you read it too. So the big fight that agile started and Digital Products / Discovery carry on is, stop focusing in Features make sure you understand your customer and deliver real value. Deliver value is not easy and still something everybody talks but feel know how to do it. The difference between a successful startup and a failed one is the ability to execute well knowing their customer and making products they love. I made some previous posts in regards to other forms of value I recommend you check it out here and here . In order to deliver the value, we need to focus on outcomes and stop focusing on output...

Building digital products are hard. There are many important and difficult disciplines that need to be cover in order to have a proper product. First of all, you need to have a product that people love(YC definition) and not only get the PMF(Product-Market-FIT) but also have proper engineering behind it. Digital products are very fresh and new compared with traditional software and projects. Since digital products are software, there is a push for delivery. Always was and always will be, which is fine don't get me wrong, however we often get half or even 1/10 of the picture. It's not only about software delivery but making sure we are building the right product and above all make sure we have customer impact with the right outcomes.

#NoProjects is an interesting movement driven by Allan Kelly . I follow Allan since 2015, I really like books. As humans, we tend just to add things up and we forget to remove, re-visit, re-cycle and re-think our values and mindsets. Effective Learning is also about unlearning. Project Myopia is a very interesting book on the matter. Projects are in the center of our universe, however, our universe should be customer-centric, product first and innovation-driven. It took me some time to realize how projects can be incompatible with digital products. Software is hard, products are even harder. Agile is all about Value, however, the IT Industry and digital product companies often have issues to define, measure and understand the value. Understanding and Seeking for value is really key to deliver better products and avoid waste(Lean).

Organizations need Lean more than ever. IT became a huge waste factory. Software scale works backward, the more money you throw in, the bigger the project the bigger your risk and bigger the waste you have. The technology work backward because If you think about Milk, the bigger the scale the cheap is the price. I was wondering how did we get into the position we are. Tech debt does not describe debt anymore, we are dealing with a totally bigger order of magnitude scale of debt. Tech debt can be big but I'm talking something beyond big. Maybe at the scale that some governments have debts with the  IMF . Why did we go south without noticing? I have some theories. Technology is like a time bomb, companies might start breaking because of it at some point. The debt become so high that multiple 3-5 years of investments might not be able to pay then off and business might start failing because of the bad technology practices. You might think I'm crazy. Because of business operates ...

First of all, I want to explain why I added a puzzle as an image for this post. This is a metaphor I'm using with several people I work. People sometimes get lost and cannot keep with modern software initiatives. Well, agile is saying that for ages and people still don't get it. There is a huge difference between Simple and Complex systems. More and more making a digital product is from far to be a simple task. However, we still want answers that we cannot get. Sometimes this creates anxiety and we need to learn how to deal with failures, chaos, bad feedback and even that our solution my suck. Ouch thats very dark, right? No, not really, this is the reality, the REAL WORLD is a cruel place and ADULTS need to call tough decisions every day. So what's the deal with simple linear systems? well they imply that quickly you can understand what you are doing and make predictions about the outcomes. Well, digital products are not like that, we cant make predictions on simple line...

Product culture and mindset is one of the most important shifts enterprise companies need to go through. Project mindset has several flaws and yet we still follow it and thats need to change.  Project culture makes us focus on the wrong outcome like Dates, Escope, Feature, Cost instead of value and User Obsession. Since 2014 I follow Allan kelly work and read his books and saw several of his videos. I also exchange some emails with him back on the days. I was amazed how makes sense to back into 2014. Even almost 5 years passed and companies still don't get it. There are other movements that push to the same direction as NoEstimates , Beyond Budget ,  OKRs , Modern Agile ,  LeanStartUp . All these movements / Books have great synergy and they basically make you thing software development in a completely different way.