Agile vs. 'unix philosophy' .moji
====================================================================
It's been a while since I've phlogged as I'm so particular about
trying to write things well or clearly (though past contributions may
not speak to that) which holds me back somewhat; so I'm setting
myself just 10-mins to write this quick 'straight into 2020' piece
here.
Life updates: I'm a couple months past my 6-month probation of a job I
still really love very much. Good people around me in everyday life
and good work. My employer sent me to South East Asia back at the end of
November for a 1-week training course, and suggested I take some extra
time as a hol, so I spent a week mainly on a motorbike up near the
border of Myanmar and North West Thailand, riding round to some of the
rice fields before the harvest, and just generally chilling out.
I've been continuing to cut down on coffee. I've switched to raw cacao
in the mornings, which is still high in antioxidents and also high in
magnesium, which I'm told is good for sleep. My moods are a hell of a
lot lighter and less anxy with less caffeine in my system on a daily
basis. I wanna see how it goes or a month or so, and maybe keep coffee
as a once-or-twice-a-month treat, like every other Friday morning
maybe.
* * *
My dayjob is working with Web-tech. Nothing too technical. I'm not a
fan of Web tech *at all*. In fact, the more I use it, the more I feel
I become familiar with design decisions that I think were bad. That's
no beef to TBL as maybe in hindsight giving that thing away for free
and launching the Web rather than some even-worse commercial iteration
that could have emerged at the time was maybe a useful thing in the
long-run. We'll see. Anyhoo, obviously everyone in the front-end world
is somewhat obsessed with agile principles/process; everyone
developing user-interfaces, or digital (Web) 'product' design,
implementations, projects, etc. Agile, agile, agile. This is nothing
new, but I've been thinking about this more lately, as the more my
dayjob weaves in and out of Web tech and this agile sense of just
getting up with some 'running code', the more I have come to see agile
as largely meaning 'not robust', or 'not the right tool for the job'.
There's essentially two scenarios where I think agile applies: one is
in vital service design, like healthcare. In the case of
healthcare, it makes sense that there's just running code being built
on and developed/changed through iterations, as the immediacy of the
care through the health service needs a reactive 'service' that it
comes up against. This makes sense to me. It's not the 'right tool for
the job', but it is 'the tool that gets the job done now', which is
what matters with healthcare. The second scenario is commercial
applications - the likes of which I have no interest in, as I dare to
dream that we may design above and/or beneath commercial applications
in a more aspirational technological landscape; one that draws the
future into the present and/or extends a commons beneath the
oppressive mechanisms of wealth and commerce.
Beneath all that it seems to me that agile is not a robust tool
design. You can contrast this so easily with some iterations of 'the
unix philosophy' which break down modular processes into their
respective, working constituent parts. But unix isn't the be-all and
end-all. I think *nix is a gateway drug to something even more useful;
a critical disposition/practice in media/tech. More on that in the
future. For now I'll leave it vague as my 10-mins are running up.
* * *
I've been enjoying the konpetio mixtakes over on Gemini. Also
following Gemini with keen interest. Thanks to the konpetio author -
I've just loaded the latest onto my phone for the commute.
I'm still trying to up my game in everyday *nix systems, playing
catch-up with you all. But I can feel myself leveling up weekly.
