Mike Bowler

I’ve written before about Daniel Kahneman’s two systems of thinking: System 1 that is very fast, requires very little energy, and is often wrong, and then System 2 that is slower, far more energy intensive, and more often right.

This article will show how to “test drive” the prime factors kata in Smalltalk with SUnit, an xUnit style unit testing framework.

This weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada, and it’s a good opportunity to consider the things we’re grateful for.

A few days ago, someone in my LinkedIn feed shared a screenshot of a post from X.

Last week I was on a busy highway, crawling along, and we drove past a metered on-ramp, where there is a stoplight controlling how fast cars can get onto the highway.

I spent last week in a hotel, where the bathroom lights were on a motion sensor.

A municipal election is coming up here in Kelowna, which means that election signs are now showing up everywhere.

When somebody asks me how to motivate their developers, one of the first things I suggest is getting them closer to the customer.

In the spirit of improving how we think, let’s consider a mental model I was working with that turned out to be almost completely wrong.

Nobody has ever bought a mobile phone because it has a battery in it and yet nobody would buy one without.

While recently working on JiraMetrics, I ran into an interesting situation with Claude (the AI tool).

For years I assumed that many of the things I was good at were nothing special.

When we’re visualizing data, the point isn’t just to make a pretty picture.

I heard someone describe effectiveness and efficiency as two ends of a spectrum.

I was asked twice this week how I handle conflict when I know it’s coming.

I recall once doing workflow mapping with a team, where they insisted that three steps in their process were done sequentially, whereas I was pretty confident that they actually did them all in parallel.

When I’m teaching user story writing, inevitably someone will write a story like “User wants to log-in”, and this is actually a horrible story.

Tomorrow, I’ll be in Canada’s Glacier National Park, hoping to see grizzly bears in the wild.

Do you feel that every hard problem lands on you?

For the first time, this site was on the receiving end of what I know as the Slashdot Effect and is today more commonly known as the Hug of Death.

You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions.

I frequently hear teams say: “We talk about the same things over and over and nothing changes.”

Every team has some definition of done, whether it’s been explicitly documented or it’s just a verbal understanding.

In a Slack conversation recently, someone asked “Isn’t it a big assumption that breaching WIP is always bad?”

Companies sometimes bring me in with the mandate: “fix my teams”.

When COVID hit and we all switched to video calls overnight, everyone started reporting how tired they were at the end of a day of meetings.