iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2025

20/ Relative to population size the 1970 Earth Day protest seems to be the largest US protest ever? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prote…

The other top 3 are George Floyd at 26 million on the high end of a multi day protest, but the US population was much larger in 2020.

No kings comes in at 6 million.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2025

9/ Ok. When you put it like that it is quite damning. California has 12% of the US population 30% of the homeless population 50% of the unsheltered homeless population

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2025

The Norwegian election is over, so I guess it’s time to read the book nobody seems to like.

Screenshot of book in audible
Abundance
New York
Times
Bestseller
Read by
the authors
Ezra Klein
Derek Thompson

Introduction: Beyond Scarcity

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2025

Last year I wondered how one could strengthen the NOK to make imports cheaper. And it turns out that the US running straight into fascism while tanking their economy was the solution all along 😬 e24.no/boers-og-finans/i/4Bw036/dol…

Graph showing a fall from 11.4 NOK per dollar to barely below 10 NOK per dollar

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2025

In the good old days of lightweight browser wars we had the ACID2 test, which reminds me of this: acid2.acidtests.org

The reference rendering which looks like an awkward pixelated smiley face

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2025

YouTube Rabbit Hole Patricia has a question for the 3D printing crowd: Is the little boat 3D-printing’s Hello World? And why that model? social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/114655…

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 07/06/2025

Changed my profile pic after getting tired of seeing the old picture on the scam account. Picture from barricade by a closed tunnel in downtown Oslo. So all of you who remembers who people are based on the profile pic: sorry, I’m the same tbh

Picture of a graffiti painting of a woman’s face, with blue hair, staring distractedly up and to the left of you.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 26/05/2025

I’m great at LinkedIn: «It’s fascinating to see how folks who were still in primary school when I was working on a browser and doing agile, are showing up with their No True Scotsman. I’ve been building products for 20 years. I have programmed […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/05/2025

Setting boundaries is good, good for you GitHub 💜 Work/Life balance ftw 🙌

Button: confirm squash and merge
Button: Cancel
Error message: Unable to read response from the server. Please try again later.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/05/2025

4/ Me: what if you’re wrong? Agile coaches: what do you mean? Me: what if this is Bad Actually? What if you’re making the organization Worse? Agile coaches: I don’t get it Me: Them: Me: Them:

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/05/2025

I feel like I should apologize for my posting. I will probably do it again, though, this is how I manage to force my brain to read something it Really Doesn’t Want To.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/05/2025

It’s becoming clear to me (on the main social media platform of the Agile Coaches: LinkedIn) that the reason I’m causing a stir is that I did the unthinkable: I actually read the entire book Twice

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

104/ This is what I mean about «textbook style», this is just regurgitating (10 year old) common knowledge, this isn’t bringing anything new, this is not their work. It belongs in a textbook for a college course or something. This book is not such a book. Or I really fucking hope not.

Technical and Cultural Maturity
Organizations at different stages of technical and cultural maturity will find dif-
ferent team structures to be effective. For example, by 2013, both Amazon and
Netflix had a well-established strategy, using cross-functional teams with end-to-
end responsibility for the services they provided to the rest of the organization.12
Meanwhile, traditional organizations adopting Agile- moving to smaller
batches of delivery-often lacked the mature engineering practices required to
keep a sustainable pace over time (such as automated testing, deployment, or
monitoring). They could benefit from a temporary DevOps team with battle-
tested engineers to bring in expertise and, more importantly, bring teams
together by collaborating on shared practices and tools.
However, without a clear mission and expiration date for such a DevOps
team, it's easy to cross the thin line between this pattern and the correspond-
ing anti-pattern of yet another silo (DevOps team) with compartmentalized
knowledge (such as configuration management, monitoring, deployment strat-
egies, and others) in the organization.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

97/ On to part 2 «Team Topologies that work for flow» and chapter 4: «Static team topologies» Note that flow, stream and domain have not been properly defined yet. And cognitive load seems to be anything that makes you unhappy at work.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

85/ «Programs which model problem solving using means-ends or alternatively, nonspecific goal strategies can be analyzed in order to obtain an indicator of the relative information-processing capacity required by the two strategies. This section describes such a procedure.»

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

73/ I have thoughts on this, but for now I just want to show this dynamic in the text (see pic). Here they use the work of 3 widely different «thought leaders» to conclude you shouldn’t add new people to a team.

Work Flows to Long-Lived Teams
Teams take time to form and be effective. Typically, a team can take from
two weeks to three months or more to become a cohesive unit. When (or if)
a team reaches that special state, it can be many times more effective than
individuals alone. If it takes three months for a team to become highly effec-
tive, we need to provide stability around and within the team to allow them
to reach that level.
There is little value in reassigning people to different teams after a six-
month project where the team has just begun to perform well. As Fred Brooks
points out in his classic book The Mythical Man-Month, adding new people to a
team doesn't immediately increase its capacity (this became known as Brooks's
law). In fact, it quite possibly reduces capacity during an initial stage. There's
a ramp-up period necessary to bring people up to speed, but the communica-
tion lines inside the team also increase significantly with every new member.
Not only that, but there is an emotional adaptation required both from new
and old team members in order to understand and accommodate each other's
points of view and work habits (the "storming" stage of Tuckman's team-devel-
opment model).
The best approach to team lifespans is to keep the team stable and "flow
the work to the team,
" as Allan Kelly says in his 2018 book Project Myopia.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/05/2025

64/ Ok, this is petty, but I had to read it twice so… A regular full book page is approximately Times New Roman 15, and a references page is approximately Times New Roman 12. The content section of the book is 185 pages, but if we subtract blank pages […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/05/2025

48/ I’m back. Chapter 2 didn’t really bring anything more to the table except ending with a subsection of This Reorg Is Different, It’s The Other Reorgs That Are Bad. Also the Spotify stuff made its entry. And these need to be studied because they seem to be pivotal to this whole book.

Kniberg, Henrik, and Anders Ivarsson. "Scaling Agile ® Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters
& Guilds." Crisp's Blog. October 2012. https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11
/SpotifyScaling.pdf.
Kniberg, Henrik. "Real-Life Agile Scaling®" Presented at the Agile Tour Bangkok, Thailand, Novem-
ber 21, 2015. http://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Real-life-agile-scaling.pdf.
Kniberg, Henrik. "Squad Health Check Model-Visualizing What to Improve." Spotify Labs (blog),
September 16, 2014. https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/16/squad-health-check-model/

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2025

45/ Got a chat platform like Slack or Teams or whatever? A way for people to talk to other people across prossess boundaries *gasp*? Beware «this kind of many-to-many communication will tend to produce monolithic, tangled, highly coupled, interdependent systems that do not support fast flow.»

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2025

41/ First, from user interaction design we actually look for these things, I saw a wonderful picture of a park as an illustration once. I couldn't find it so this will do. The idea is that "unintended uses" reveal real needs. So if I saw two teams that […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

A photo from high ground showing a green between buildings at a university, with some paved paths and a myriad of unpaved clearly visible, downtrodden, highly used paths.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2025

40/ I have so many issues with this text we’ll just have to take them one by one. As a meta comment I am concerned that the authors are once again taking Other Peoples Thoughts and presenting them as if they’re saying the opposite of what they were […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

«Restrict Unnecessary Communication
One key implication of Conway's law is that not all communication and collaboration is good. Thus it is important to define "team interfaces" to set expectations around what kind of work requires strong collaboration and what
doesn't. Many organizations assume that more communication is always better, but this is not really the case.
What we need is focused communication between specific teams. We need
to look for unexpected communication and address the cause; as Manuel
Sosa and colleagues found in their 2004 research into aircraft manufactur-
ing, "managers should focus their efforts on understanding the causes of
unaddressed design interfaces... and unpredicted team interactions... across
modular systems."
Mike Cohn, one of the originators of the Scrum product-development
approach, asks these questions to assess the health of inter-team communication within an organization: "Does the structure minimize the number of communication paths between teams?... Does the structure encourage teams
to communicate who wouldn't otherwise do so?»

«Here, Cohn is addressing the need to ensure that if, logically, two teams shouldn't need to communicate based on the software architecture design, then something must be wrong if the teams are communicating. Is the API not good enough? Is the platform not suitable? Is a component missing? If we can achieve low-bandwidth communication - or even zero-bandwidth communication -
between teams and still build and release software in a safe, effective, rapid
way, then we should. This is visualized in Figure 2.5, which is based on Henrik
Kniberg's "Real Life Agile Scaling."

Figure 2.5: Inter-Team Communication
Communication within teams is high bandwidth. Communication between two
"paired" teams can be mid bandwidth. Communication between most teams
should be low bandwidth.

A simple way to restrict communication is to move two teams to different parts of the office, different floors, or even different buildings. If the teams are virtual or mostly communicate over a chat messenger tool, the volume»

Continues in next picture

$«and patterns of the team-to-team communications can help identify communications that do not match the interactions expected for the software architecture. Similarly, if a large team regularly deals with two separate areas of the system, it can be useful to split this team into two smaller teams dedicated to each part, although only if it's the same team members who work on different systems. If the whole team works on more than one part of the system by design (for example, a newer service and an older component), keep the team together. (See Chapter 8 for more on patterns for long-term "continuity of care" for older software systems.) Sometimes, two or more teams may feel the need to communicate on software purely because the code for their parts of the system is in the same version-control repository or is even part of the same application or service, whereas logically, it should be separate. In these cases, we need to use "fracture plane" patterns (which will be discussed in Chapter 6) to split up the software into smaller chunks that can live in separate repositories.»$

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2025

34/ Galaxy Brain: if they can’t talk, they can’t collaborate! It’s almost funny how they draw the exact opposite conclusion from what Conway was expressing. He was expressing a problem, they have written a whole book on creating this problem on purpose.

Picture of parts of a page in the book:

«Why are organizations unlikely to discover or sustain certain architectures? Conway provides some clues in his 1968 article: "Given any [particular] team organization, there is a class of design alternatives which cannot be effec-
tively pursued by such an organization because the necessary communication paths do not exist."
Communication paths (along formal reporting lines or not) within an organization effectively restrict the kinds of solutions that the organization can devise. But we can use this to our strategic advantage. If we want to discourage certain kinds of designs - perhaps those that are too focused on technical
internals - we can reshape the organization to avoid this. Similarly, if we want our organization to discover and adopt certain designs - perhaps those more amenable to flow - then we can reshape the organization to help make that
happen. There is, of course, no guarantee that the organization will find and use the designs we want, but at least by shaping the communication paths, we are making it more likely.
Organization design using Conway's law becomes a key strategic activity that can greatly accelerate the discovery of effective software designs and help avoid those less effective. (In Chapter 8, we go into more detail on how to evolve an organization strategically with Conway's law in mind.)»

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2025

31/ And since I'm honestly worried y'all will think I have completely misunderstood everything, I present a couple of beautiful (told you the graphical designer was good) and completely nonsensical figures from this chapter.

4 applications that seem to consist of a ui layer and a "app tier", represented by 4 blue boxes labeled UI each with a corresponding arrow to their "app tier box", where the 4 "app tiers" have pointers to a single Core DB which has an arrow to a box with Ops on it.

Text: Figure 2.2: Software Architecture from Four-Team Organization
Four separate applications, each with a separate user interface (UI) and a backend application tier that communicate with a single shared database. This reflects and matches the team communication architecture from Figure 2.1;
the diagram has simply been rotated ninety degrees.

Four teams labled A to D have a front end dev and a back end dev box and then the backend dev boxes point to a DBA box which then points to an Ops box.

Text: Figure 2.1: Four Teams Working on a Software System Four separate teams consisting of front-end and back-end developers work on a software system. Front-end devs communicate only with back-end devs, who communicate with a single DBA for the database changes.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 12/05/2025

22/ It’s also important to point out that Conway himself argued, in this paper, the one from which this law is derived, for a flexible organization that can adapt to changing design and geared towards collaboration. www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_P…

Conclusion
The basic thesis of this article is that
organizations which design systems (in the
broad sense used here) are constrained to
produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these
organizations. We have seen that this fact
has important implications for the
management of system design. Primarily, we
have found a criterion for the structuring of
design organizations: a design effort should
be organized according to the need for
communication.
This criterion creates problems because the
need to communicate at any time depends
on the system concept in effect at that time.
Because the design which occurs first is
almost never the best possible, the
prevailing system concept may need to
change. Therefore, flexibility of organization
is important to effective design.
Ways must be found to reward design
managers for keeping their organizations
lean and flexible.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 12/05/2025

Alright, I'm back with what I assume will be a week long rage thread about a book I hate. It's really not important for current events in any way, but I signed up for a talk about it in the before-times. So mute this, it's absolutely not interesting […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

Picture of my physical copy of Team Topologies

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/11/2024

Them: did you hear about this toxic culture in this tech community? Me: no, do you have some links? *does 20 minutes of research* Ah, yeah, of course, they have a core team of C++ devs with a toxic culture…

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/11/2024

Screenshot of my reply in a conversation on if the “C++ governance is toxic” could have been solved. (Privacy settings of others might mean it’s not visible)

@benignbala @JamesWidman @bruxisma
@AaronBallman tbh I think it could have
been done, but it required solidarity and to
basically go on strike, and when I realized
that there wasn't any appetite for that in the
committee, either because they agreed or
because they didn't want to risk anything,
then I had to walk away too. Even if C++
didn't make me anxious now, I don't feel
safe in the community anymore, lots of
people have written lots of things about me,
both privately and publicly and I can't have
a career where I'm afraid when I'm in my so
called "community", "so called" because I
realized way too late that it never was a
community for people like me. They made
perfectly clear who they prioritize, I just
spent way too much time thinking I must've
misunderstood.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/11/2024

Y’all yesterday I thought maybe I was nuts but now I’m feeling pretty vindicated tbh social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/113467…

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/11/2024

Lol, people in my mentions fighting over how many votes different dictators got are missing the point entirely.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/11/2024

When people go “oh well he’s immune and all the ongoing cases are also out so I guess he’ll get away with it” I think of Nicolae Ceaușescu. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%…

As anti-government protesters demonstrated
in Timisoara in December 1989, Ceausescu
perceived the demonstrations as a political
threat and ordered military forces to open fire
on 17 December, causing many deaths and
injuries. The revelation that Ceausescu was
responsible resulted in a massive spread of
rioting and civil unrest across the country. The
demonstrations, which reached Bucharest,
became known as the Romanian Revolution—
the only violent overthrow of a communist
government in the course of the Revolutions of
1989. Ceausescu and his wife Elena fled the
capital in a helicopter enrouting to Vatican via
Vienna, Austria, but they were captured in
Romanian territory by the military after the
armed forces defected. After being tried and
convicted of economic sabotage and genocide,
both were sentenced to death, and they were
immediately executed by firing squad on 25
December. [21[31[4][5]

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/11/2024

Me hoping there really is a Deep State Biden wondering how far he can push his presidential immunity and still be considered a Good Guy And the riff raff left of the Republican Party wondering how much they can sell out their country without triggering a Civil War. This is fine.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/11/2024

I’m still here listening to podcasts, trying to do typescript and wondering how I can be so bad at this when my first browser building job was in 2005.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 11/11/2024

If some of these names are suddenly very familiar to you, maybe you wanna see @timnitGebru going through their common philosophical foundation? (Content warning: they are all fucking nuts and extremely dangerous) youtu.be/P7XT4TWLzJw?si=0BYLEt6mjzC…

Properties of the TESCREAL Bundle
(Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitanism, Rationalism, Cosmism, Effective Altruism,
Longtermism)
3) Influence.
• Lots of billionaires in the movement or sympathetic to it, funding it etc.
• E.g. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, Dustin Moskovits, Sam Altman,
Vitalik Buterin, Sam Bankman-Fried....
Crucial motivating source behind goal of creating AGl, and moving resources
and focus to it.
Timnit Gebru

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2024

If the US tries to leverage NATO membership to pressure Europe for bullshit cronyism, they’ll never show up when it matters anyway. Boy, bye 👋 www.independent.co.uk/news/world/am…

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 06/11/2024

This is the fascist the US elected yesterday, 32 years ago, when he could still string a sentence together, articulating this fertile ground of hate and his admiration for David Duke, a neo-Nazi and a grand wizard of the KKK, for knowing how to stoke these flames.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 27/10/2024

Latex looking at me: this is your level of badness 😒

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2024

Movie tip: if you ever hurt your back so bad you need several different pain meds to be able to shuffle carefully and slowly to the kitchen of your own house: Don’t try to watch Tenet. 🫠 (To be fair I mix up left and right in my normal state so this might be hard for my brain in any event)

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2024

It’s so funny when now and then folks talk to me about my “online presence” as if this is some sort of marketing jazz hands and not my ADHD brain pushing Thought Into Machine before it slips through the cracks. Oversharing because I’m too lazy for a diary or a blog. And it has gifs!

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2024

Hey, it’s my birthday 🥳 and my birthday wish is to hear about a small or huge win you’ve had in your life lately 💜 #TinyWin

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2024

I need world politics not to be so freaking depressing. Please and thank you. Also I’d like climate change to be humanity top priority. But I can see that is completely unrealistic at the moment.

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2024

I’ve been watching Stargate on @veronica’s recommendation and my favorite thing is that whenever something happens that would normally make you doubt your sanity, they just go: “well, we’ve seen stranger things, like maybe we went back in time by accident […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2024

@olafurw talking about DOOM in space 🔥 at the #NDCTechTown party 🚀

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Patricia Aas @patricia.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2024

I felt a bit ignorant when I hadn’t heard the term “medical bankruptcy” until quite recently, but it seems there is a reason for that: “As it turns out, medical bankruptcy is almost unheard of outside of the United States.” A few other countries too, all […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

Bankruptcies Caused
by Medical Expenses Country

United States 66.5%
Canada 19%
Australia 10%
United Kingdom 8.2%

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