Role Of Practices

On the one hand, you'd like to tell people to just do their job a little better every day. Some folks will take this advice and run with it, but many teams will stumble about in the dark, perhaps doing better, but nowhere near as well as they could by looking at their problems a new way.

We have a little hill between my office and my house. My kids always push their bikes up this hill. Then one day we got a visit from MassimoArnoldi and his family. His kids grabbed the bikes and pedaled right up. Now my kids are pedaling up, too.

The practices act like a visit from the other kids. They point you to possibilities you would never stumble over in a hundred years of tiny improvements.

PracticesVersusEtudes

The danger of listing practices is that people will think they are the process. That's one of the reasons I'm thinking of changing the name to "etudes". An etude is a piece of music you learn to master a skill, not because they are good pieces of music. The next time you play real music that requires the skill, you find it easy because you mastered the etude. Practices are like that. They aren't programming, they are things you do to make certain aspects of programming easy.

Great idea, I'd appreciate a ProgrammingEtudes? page myself.