Situated Geekery

Let’s cut right to the chase:  Because I’m feeling old, and am therefore in strong need of the thesis that I have achieved some wisdom.

When I ask about what I know that might actually be useful to people, I am given pause.  I have several skills, as programmer and teacher and coach.  I suppose I could just divide everything I want to share into three separate categories.  If  I do that, though, I think I’d have two problems:  1) I like to think about and share a whole lot more than just those three areas.  2) A lot of what I know about those three skills is actually shared between all three.

When I settled into a reverie and concentrated on that second problem, I began to realize something important:  my success in those three areas was all of a single fabric.  I cast around for a while to name that aspect my successes have, and I finally settled on ‘situated geekery’.

Leonardo's Proportion Study (slightly retouched).

The essential idea of situated geekery is this:  the successful approach to life for creators of highly technical output is to fully elaborate, engage, and enjoy the situations into which they are thrown.

If viagra fast you don’t have any scope to further failures. Masturbating a few free cialis sample hours before indulging in sexual intercourse, making for steamy time with partner. What makes sildenafil tablets powerful against impotence? While sildenafil is commonly used for treating high blood pressure, its active ingredient of PDE-5 inhibitor enzyme tadalafil tabs plays a positive role and allows the blood to be flown in plentiful amount. What you can do cialis generic online instead is contact the Singapore Urological Association and get a recommendation from them. If I push on that idea hard enough, I see that it really encompasses far more of my activities than merely the ones from which I’ve built a career.  That’s okay, though I still need something useful to say to my immediate peers in the software biz, and I do.  See, I have spent the last ten years of my life heavily embedded in the eXtreme Programming (XP) movement.  All the way from first to last, I have been pleased with XP’s barehanded rejection of human-less schemes for writing software.  That is, XP for me was the first methodology that said, in no uncertain terms, that since writing software is a human enterprise above all else, our best thinking about how to improve it must be fully vested in this humanness.

Consider XP’s open workspace and why and how it works.  The open workspace is a statement about how actual humans actually do their best at exchanging information.  XP says short continuous informal approaches work better than longer more discrete and more formal approaches.  This is not a statement about how important communication is to a geek team.  Both traditional methods and XP agree that communication is vital to success.  Rather, this is a statement about the humans on these teams.  It says that humans do best using one form of communication over another.  As a professional XP coach, I can tell you that one of the first measures I take of a team is the extent of the ‘buzz and flow’:  how well the open workspace is working for them.  There are many more examples of this kind of thing in XP.

But XP isn’t synonymous with situated geekery, even though it was the place where I was started on the path.  Situated geekery is about a path to excellence and joy for those who create highly technical products.  Over time, I hope this site will help me explore, extend, and share my grasp of this idea.

Situated geekery takes as its starting premise the idea that the more we geeks know about where we fit in the world, the more joyfully successful we can be. 

What else is situated geekery? That remains to be seen.  Please come along for the ride!