An Intro to Spikes | #60

I use spikes, periods of code-changing activity that end with no pushes, all the time, at small scale and large, as a way to develop my path. It's a vital technique, and it's often underplayed, so let's spend some time with it. What's a spike? A spike is a stretch of time I spend mucking about in code, and that stretch of time has one rule: "Do anything you want, because you can't keep it." We originally used the term to describe a certain kind of story. We'd be facing some task without the slightest clue of how to perform it. So we'd put a story in place whose goal was "figure out how to do X". But we explicitly separated "figure out how" from "do". The rationale here was based around our sense that practicing XP meant a certain rigor in our behavior. But maintaining that XP level of self-control can be difficult at times, and the most particularly difficult times to do that were times when we felt we had literally no clue.  --- You can read the full transcription of this podcast over on GeePawHill.org. Any feedback, you can always tweet @GeePawHill on Twitter, or drop a voice message via the voice messages link here on Anchor. If you are interested in becoming more involved in the Change-Harvesting community, click here to learn how to join GeePaw's Camerata.