Enrico Zini: 05
Internet references saved for May 2015
Instead of keeping substantial tabs open until I have read all of them, or
losing them in the jungle of browser bookmarks, I have written a script
that collects them into a file per month, and turns them into markdown files
for my blog. This way I sort of know where to find them, and if I do not, some
internet search might. And if I wish, I can even choose to share it.
- The programming talent myth [LWN.net] Jacob Kaplan-Moss is known for his work on Django but, as he would describe in his keynote, many think he had more to do with its creation than he actually did. While his talk ranged quite a bit, the theme covered something that software development organizations and open source projects may be grappling with: a myth about developer performance and how it impacts the industry. It was a thought-provoking talk that was frequently punctuated by applause; these are the kinds of issues that the Python community tries to confront head on, so the talk was aimed well.
- Weblog for dkg - Preferred Packaging Practices git-buildpackage-based packaging practices from dkg
- Matt Palmer: The Vicious Circle of Documentation Why are there so many more undocumented systems than documented ones out there, and how can we cause more well-documented systems to exist? The answer isn t people are lazy , and the solution is simple though not easy.
- German Courses DW.DE Free German courses
- Jono Bacon, Dealing With Disrespect This book is about helping us to focus on good people creating good things, to preserve that spirit of sharing, and to protect against those whose primary contribution is obstruction and disrespect
- Stack Overflow: unix - What are the dark corners of Vim your mom never told you about? Collection of vim tips that people actually use
- OFTC: Automatically Identifying Using SSL + CertFP This page describes how to use SSL with a certificate fingerprint to automatically identify your registered nickname with NickServ on connect. You must have an IRC client that supports SSL with a client certificate.
- Fran ois Marier: Usual Debian Server Setup I manage a few servers for myself, friends and family as well as for the Libravatar project. Here is how I customize recent releases of Debian on those servers.
- The public SIP and ENUM service sip5060.net SIP service, also providing test call services for SIP clients
- How to name things: the hardest problem in programming Developers can get better at their craft by learning from the great writers who mastered theirs. Writing software isn t the same as writing a novel, but there are parallels. Besides, advice from writers is better because writers have been struggling with their craft for many centuries, not just a few decades. It s better-written as well. This talk shares great writers best advice for coders: Stephen King on refactoring, Anne Rice on development hardware, Hemingway on modelling with personas, and Neil Gaiman on everything.
What happened about the 
Ingredients
Who are you?
I am 
me: Who are you?
joeyh: I'm Joey -- 
Last weekend I went to Mumbai to attend the 
A friend recently commented on my rather unusual portrait on 
The 
Sophie stood before me. I'm leaving with that guy, she gestured.
Yes, I thought that would happen, I chuckled.
She hugged me. The guy, whose name we managed to never utter, did not
hug me, though he usually does. They went home together.
That was the last time I saw Sophie.
The rest of us sat down, finished our drinks, and split up. I went with
Sophie's ex-girlfriend and the guy who sometimes serves as her ironic
beard.
They smoked their disgusting light cigarettes, the kind with very little
tobacco but lots of horrible chemicals that make me cough and hopefully
fail to give me lung cancer, because watching someone else die of that
was excruciating enough.
So we get to our next destination and there is a Peruvian girl
sitting on a stool and shopping for shoes on her phone. I am
fascinated. Phone app developers had told me that people
actually did this but I thought it was just wishful thinking
on their part.
The Peruvian girl, who is named something that
sounds like it was uttered accidentally by Tommy Gnosis,
complains to Sophie's ex-girlfriend that some guy keeps
harassing her. We instinctively form a human barrier to shield
her from this alleged transgressor, who, it turns out, is
the pompous drug dealer with whom Sophie's ex-girlfriend is just
about to conduct business.
I'll be right back, she says. Hit on her.
What Why I shout after her. There is no response.
Sophie's ex-girlfriend and the drug dealer return from the darkness,
having swapped possessions.
The drug dealer is a blowhard and proceeds to regale us with stories
so little interest to me that I can't even remember what they were
about, but as drug dealers are wont to do, he abuses the power of his
possession to maintain the delusion that people would tolerate his
presence even if he didn't have illegal commodities to sell them.
When the beard and Sophie's ex-girlfriend go out for a smoke break,
I went home.
Following the lead of my dear friend Daniel and 
Big changes are always a complicated thing to get done and can be the harder the bigger or more diverse an organization is it is taking place in.
Transparency
Ideally every change is well communicated early and openly.
Leaving people in the dark about what will change and when means people have much less time to feeling comfortable about it or arranging with it mentally.
Especially bad can be extending the change later or or shortening transition periods.
Letting people think they have some time to transition only to force them to rush later will remove any credibility you have and severely reduce their ability to believe you are not crossing them.
Making a new way optional is a great way to create security (see below), but making that obligatory before the change even arrives as optional with them will not make them very willing to embrace change.
Take responsibility
Every transformation means costs.
Even if some change did only improve and did not make anything worse once implemented (the ideal change you will never meet in reality), the deployment of the change still costs:
processes have adapted to it, people have to relearn how to do things, how to detect if something goes wrong, how to fix it, documentation has to be adopted and and and.
Even as the change causes more good than costs in the whole organization (let's hope it does, I hope you wouldn't try to do something if the total benefit is negative), the benefits and thus the benefit to cost ratio will differ for the different parts of your organization or the different people within it.
It's hardly avoidable that for some people there will not be much benefit, much less perceived benefit compared to the costs they have to burden for it.
Those are the people whose good will you want to fight for, not the people you want to fight against.
They have to pay with their labor/resources and thus their good will for your benefit the overall benefit.
This is much easier if you acknowledge that fact.
If you blame them for having the costs, claim their situation does not even exist or even ridicule them for not embracing change you only prepare yourself for frustration.
You might be able to persuade yourself that everyone that is not willing to invest in the change is just acting out of malevolent self-interest.
But you will hardly be able to persuade people that it is evil to not help your cause if you treat them as enemies.
And once you ignored or played down costs that later actually happen, your credibility in being able to see the big picture will simply cease to exist at all for the next change.
Allow different metrics
People have different opinions about priorities, about what is important, about how much something costs and even about what is a problem.
If you want to persuade them, try to take that into account.
If you do not understand why something is a reason, it might be because the given point is stupid. But it might also be that you miss something. And often there is simple a different valuation of what is important, what the costs are and what are problems.
If you want to persuade people, it is worth to try to understand those.
If all you want to do is persuade some leader or some majority then ridiculing their concerns might get you somewhere.
But how do you want to win people over if you do not even appear to understand their problems.
Why should people trust you that their costs will be worth the overall benefits if you tell them the costs that they clearly see do not exist? How credible is referring to the bigger picture if the part of the picture they can see does not match what you say the bigger picture looks like?
Don't get trolled and don't troll
There will always be people that might be unreasonable or even try to provoke you. Don't allow being provoked. Remember that for successful changes you need to win broad support. Feeling personally attacked or feeling presented a large amount of pointless arguments easily results in not bringing proper responses or actually looking at arguments.
If someone is only trolling and purely malevolent, they will tease you best if they bring actual concerns of people in a way you likely degrade your yourself and your point in answering.
Becoming impertinent with the troll is like attacking the annoying little goblin hiding next to the city guards with area damage.
When not being able to persuade people, it is also far to easy to consider them in bad faith and/or attacking them personally. This can only escalate even more. Worst case you frustrate someone in good faith. In most cases you poison the discussion so much that people actually in good faith will no longer contribute the discussion. It might be rewarding short term because after some escalation only obviously unreasonable people will talk against you, but it makes it much harder to find solutions together that could benefit anyone and almost impossible to persuade those that simply left the discussion.
Give security
Last but not least, remember that humans are quite risk-averse. In general they might invest in (even small) chances to win, but go a long way to avoid risks.
Thus an important part of enabling change is to reduce risks, real and perceived ones and give people a feeling of security.
In the end, almost every measure boils down to that:
You give people security by giving them the feeling that the whole picture is considered in decisions (by bringing them early into the process, by making sure their concerns are understood and part of the global profit/cost calculation and making sure their experiences with the change are part of the evaluation).
You give people security by allowing them to predict and control things (by transparency about plans, how far the change will go and guaranteed transitions periods, by giving them enough time so they can actually plan and do the transition).
You give people security by avoiding early points of no return (by having wide enough tests, rollback scenarios,...).
You give people security by not letting them alone (by having good documentation, availability of training, ...).
Especially side-by-side availability of old and new is an extremely powerful tool, as it fits all of the above:
It allows people to actually test it (and not some little prototype mostly but not quite totally unrelated to reality) so their feedback can be heard. It makes it more predictable as all the new ways can be tried before the old ones no longer work. It is the ultimate role-back scenario (just switch off the new). And allows for learning the new before losing the old.
Of course giving the people a feeling of security needs resources. But it is a very powerful way to get people to embrace the chance.
Also in my experience people only fearing for themselves will usually mostly be passive by not pushing forward and trying to avoid or escape the changes.
(After all, working against something costs energy, so purely egoistic behavior is quite limiting in that regard).
Most people actively pushing back do it because they fear for something larger than only them. And any measure to making them fear less that you ruin the overall organization, not only avoids unnecessary hurdles rolling out the change but also has some small chance to actually avoid running into disaster with closed eyes.
For some reason, I seem to end up writing software for
