Measuring Developer Productivity and the Clock of the Long Now

What A Lot Of Things: Tech talk from a human perspective

Your favorite tech podcast stretches out for a luxurious 75 minutes this time, like a cat in a sunbeam (speaking of which, meet Ash's new rescue cat Bauhaus).

Ian and Ash dive into McKinsey's latest thoughts on measuring developer productivity, leading to some choice words about their take on "quality assurance testers." Things get wonderfully weird when Ian introduces the Clock of the Long Now - a 10,000-year timepiece being built inside a Texas mountain, complete with never-repeating chimes and powered by temperature differences between day and night.

Fresh from running 100km at God's Own Backyard Ultra (where you run a loop every hour until you can't), Ash contemplates the value of doing things slowly in our rush-rush world. Ian makes a triumphant return to public speaking with an AI talk (using the intriguing IA Presenter), and recommends The Bear - a stressful but compelling show about a high-stakes restaurant kitchen that might just teach us something about team dynamics. Yes chef!

Links

• Why embracing complexity is the real challenge in software today
• DORA’s software delivery metrics: the four keys
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity
• Yes, you can measure software developer productivity
• Wikipedia: Goodhart's Law
• God's Own Backyard Ultra 2024 – Results
• Bauhaus - the movement, not the band.
• IA Writer and IA Presenter
• Ian's talk: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with AI: A Squadify Case Study and Squadify where Ian is CTO
• The Bear
• The Clock of the Long Now, and the prototype in the Science Museum in London
• The Long Now Foundation and Danny Hillis
• Svalbard Global Seed Vault
• Utopia for Realists–the book Ash couldn't remember the title of.