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. peace. -moji.