“Software design is an exercise in human relationships”—that’s the motto of Tidy First? Which relationships am I talking about? (The following is a half-baked exploration of ideas intended to get me back to writing book-quality content once I’m clearer. You’ll see the polished version in the book.)
"My relationship with myself is the third set of relationships, the one I’m focusing on in Tidy First?"
I really felt suffering from this one recently, and would even feel that is the most important one.
Painful / slow review process, tend to just leave me in a uncomfortable state, where I would want to clean code before doing something, but getting stuck with the review taking an eternity.
So I would just "maybe" do Tidying after, but be really in bad code state.
Or suffer from even longer delays if I would clean before, have many changes flying at the same time that I need to rebase.
But that really really frustrates me and limits what I am able to do (and that I want to do without even be forced to).
On one of the project I have 1 tenth of a reviewer so is on an extreme level and can really feel the issue with this.
To be in a nice relation with myself, I need that these cleanups are possible, cheap and fast.
I thought for a long time why I want "Tidy First? and split PRs" even tried to propose it in my team with "objective arguments", used your video as a base, discussed it, and focused a justification on these two first relationships.
But actually, I do not really care that it makes change faster for the 2 first relationships, I really just want a better environment for myself.
Where I can clean stuff, and where behavior changing pull requests from other changers are not a pain to review because they mix too many things.
With still in mind, my freedom limit is when the group freedom is not harmed. So if I want some better things for me, they should be the same for everybody.
So I would compromise and take on me to review really fast these "trivial"/"refactoring" pull requests, just so that if I need to do the same ones, they could be reviewed quickly.
I want a better relationship with myself, and it is acceptable because it does not hurt my changers and waiters colleagues.
As a bonus it even benefits them, but I would personally not anymore put it as first thing. Otherwise a "do shift working to increase the company productivity" argument would also be valid.
Does not work for IT but it's just an example of focusing productivity over people life.
I think in addition to the relationship with ourselves not being prioritized due to a lack of respect for ourselves, I often find it just being a lower priority than the first two relationships. So I don't always actively feel like I don't deserve the investment but it just isn't a higher priority than the needs from the other relationships which often feel more urgent. This is often a bad way to prioritize things since investing in those things for relationship 3 can enable us to more effectively improve the other relationships as well.
"I’m not worth making my job easier so I just do the hard job, over & over".
^ I was JUST talking about this with my friend Justin - (in the context of an automation over documentation discussion).
We go... "oh, it's no big deal, take it on the chin"... and don't think much of it. We repeat the "hard job" over and over... but it does have an impact on our relationship with ourselves - and likely cascades outwards to others involved in the software.
Thanks for this writing, it's giving me more helpful tools to frame experiences, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
"My relationship with myself is the third set of relationships, the one I’m focusing on in Tidy First?"
I really felt suffering from this one recently, and would even feel that is the most important one.
Painful / slow review process, tend to just leave me in a uncomfortable state, where I would want to clean code before doing something, but getting stuck with the review taking an eternity.
So I would just "maybe" do Tidying after, but be really in bad code state.
Or suffer from even longer delays if I would clean before, have many changes flying at the same time that I need to rebase.
But that really really frustrates me and limits what I am able to do (and that I want to do without even be forced to).
On one of the project I have 1 tenth of a reviewer so is on an extreme level and can really feel the issue with this.
To be in a nice relation with myself, I need that these cleanups are possible, cheap and fast.
I thought for a long time why I want "Tidy First? and split PRs" even tried to propose it in my team with "objective arguments", used your video as a base, discussed it, and focused a justification on these two first relationships.
But actually, I do not really care that it makes change faster for the 2 first relationships, I really just want a better environment for myself.
Where I can clean stuff, and where behavior changing pull requests from other changers are not a pain to review because they mix too many things.
With still in mind, my freedom limit is when the group freedom is not harmed. So if I want some better things for me, they should be the same for everybody.
So I would compromise and take on me to review really fast these "trivial"/"refactoring" pull requests, just so that if I need to do the same ones, they could be reviewed quickly.
I want a better relationship with myself, and it is acceptable because it does not hurt my changers and waiters colleagues.
As a bonus it even benefits them, but I would personally not anymore put it as first thing. Otherwise a "do shift working to increase the company productivity" argument would also be valid.
Does not work for IT but it's just an example of focusing productivity over people life.
I think in addition to the relationship with ourselves not being prioritized due to a lack of respect for ourselves, I often find it just being a lower priority than the first two relationships. So I don't always actively feel like I don't deserve the investment but it just isn't a higher priority than the needs from the other relationships which often feel more urgent. This is often a bad way to prioritize things since investing in those things for relationship 3 can enable us to more effectively improve the other relationships as well.
"I’m not worth making my job easier so I just do the hard job, over & over".
^ I was JUST talking about this with my friend Justin - (in the context of an automation over documentation discussion).
We go... "oh, it's no big deal, take it on the chin"... and don't think much of it. We repeat the "hard job" over and over... but it does have an impact on our relationship with ourselves - and likely cascades outwards to others involved in the software.
Thanks for this writing, it's giving me more helpful tools to frame experiences, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.