Episode 279 | Fred George - Making Sure the Right Decisions Are Made

Guest:

Fred George

@fgeorge52

Fred George talks with Dave Rael about writing software, programmer anarchy, cyclical change, and leadership

Fred George is a consultant with many decades experience in the industry including over twenty years doing object programming and over a dozen years doing Agile/XP. He's a hands-on software developer with executive responsibilities and experience, an early experimenter in micro-service architectures from 2005, and father of the post-Agile process termed Programmer Anarchy. He's an earlier implementer of new technology for his entire career, including computer networking in the 70's, LAN's and GUI in the 80's, and OO and Agile in the 90's. He's a very early adopter of Kanban processes and considered the "grandfather of microservices" and may have coined the term. He has used over 70 programming languages in his career (so far).

Chapters: 3:47 - Dave introduces the show and Fred George6:10 - Programmer Anarchy11:01 - Fred on moving in and out of management12:41 - Fred on leadership and the use of authority and persuasion15:14 - Prescriptive application of Programmer Anarchy and Extreme Programming19:02 - Psychological safety and experimentation20:29 - How Fred got started in software22:47 - Cyclical changes27:09 - The things that "light Fred up"30:30 - Fred on failure - projects that were killed, businesses with dysfunction, avoiding failure, and working with good people34:46 - Fred on firing people39:00 - The value of diversity42:16 - Microservices47:12 - How Fred stays current with what he needs to know49:26 - Fred's book recommendations51:18 - The things that have Fred most excited53:39 - Fred's top 3 tips for delivering more value54:27 - Keeping up with Fred

Resources: Fred Speaking on Programmer Anarchy Fred George Query on YouTube Michael Bolton on Developer On Fire Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 2nd Edition (The XP Series) - Kent Beck Anarchy Doc Norton on Developer On Fire Fred on .NET Rocks! talking about Programmer Anarchy The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist - Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Jim Rohn - "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." Richard Campbell on Developer On Fire Josh Varty on Developer On Fire Jeff Sutherland Adrian Cockcroft on Microservices Martin Fowler Dave Thomas Dave Thomas on Developer On Fire Kent Beck

Fred's book recommendation: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Martin Fowler Refactoring: Ruby Edition: Ruby Edition (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby) - Jay Fields Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns - Kent Beck Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - Erich Gamma The Elements of Java(TM) Style (SIGS Reference Library) - Allan Vermeulen

Fred's top 3 tips for delivering more value: Understand the problem you're solving Know your colleagues, their strengths and weaknesses, and complement them Be assertive about being successful and have a success mindset