Patrick Welsh

Hi, it’s Mike again with Yugotastic. I’m here at SCNA. I’m sitting down with Patrick Welsh. Patrick is an Agile coach and tester. I kind of said like a holistic Agilist. But yesterday we had a kind of interesting conversation and he brought up the topic of a network weaver. Well, first, thanks for sitting down with me, but what is a network weaver? What does that word mean? So, the term, as introduced to me, means something that people kind of either are or not, you know. So, natural programmers are people who can’t prevent themselves from programming or they’ll start to go a little stir-crazy. And I am a natural network weaver and I’ll describe the algorithm, which is actually kind of simple. It’s a simple algorithm that network weavers can’t prevent themselves from following. It goes like this. They join communities and they join… They join communities relatively easy, easily. They find it easy to meet people and to become part of communities in some way. And they’re comfortable joining lots of communities and they keep track of what different people in different communities love and are good at and work hard on. And they tend to remember when there are opportunities for people in different communities to connect and they make those connections. And so, what ends up happening is that they cause… Okay. A cross-pollination to occur. Right. So, both communities that have members cross back and forth end up being helped by that fresh blood and fresh ideas. Yeah. So, you don’t have the island effect and then you have… Yes. And everybody looks a little bit too much alike and the forehead’s a little too far out. But by bringing in the new genetic material, the new ideas… Exactly so, yeah. They distribute and then everybody can be healthy and have a good immune system. Right. Yeah. So, that relates to, you know, technical user communities in a way to me that if we share ideas and go to different user groups and reach out for, like, hey, I’m a Rubyist but I want to do a JavaScript group. Or I wanted to even go even further out and go to a .NET meeting, something I’m not even doing. Those are classic examples, by the way. And I have helped weave connections between communities in each of those areas that were mostly insular. Right. And, you know, it turns out that a lot of Rubyists don’t know that there’s this beautiful, dynamically typed, functional programming language hiding deep within the dysfunction of JavaScript. Right. And if you frame it just correctly to them and hook them up with the right person, then it becomes easier and more fun for them to learn JavaScript. And JavaScript programmers can learn that there’s this Ruby community in which there is much less of the danger and noise, much better signal-to-noise ratio. Right. language both people in both those different communities end up being grateful for the comparison and for the connection and for learning those different things at least that’s how that’s how it works well when people are sufficiently passionate right and also it kind of makes me wonder about with the kind of movement to see more suffer craftsmanship oriented groups we’re here at SCNA which is getting more and more popular every year and and receive more suffer craftsmanship themed user groups where they’re not tied to a specific platform specific language just so we have this kind of similar ideals we’d like to be more like this way but we have different ways of approaching that problem you know so they’re more open to having that I think network weaving where you have the PHP guy come in and you see guy and the guy who does Java I should say then probably the Ruby gal just to be yeah oh absolutely yeah but but you know you have a mixture of different ideas and genders and racial backgrounds coming together and instead of thinking about well how can I identify with people that have this one specific trait they share with me how can I mix with a lot of different people and and and get new ideas and fresh ideas and maybe new perspective I mean is that kind of like a natural organic way that this concept of the network weaving is becoming more of a concept in technical communities or no I would say it’s always been there and it’s it’s a kind of minority prejudice if you will I cannot prevent myself from joining different communities I’m addicted to joining communities learning about communities learning how people learn their definitions of success and failure what they’re courageous about the things that they consider important and you know when you mention a craftsmanship movement that’s in software right now I see all these threads that cut across communities that have to do with things like accountability and professionalism and mentoring and fresh blood and those things are easy for me to talk easy for me to talk about with some authority and experience the more communities I have participated in but I can’t if for me it’s it’s kind of an obsession it’s an addiction I know a lot of people who really want to concentrate deeply in a single place in a relatively narrow community where there’s usually plenty to learn and know right and they want to stay there and they want to learn deeply and I tend to move more broadly and I you know sometimes sit for a while and mull and concentrate but I mostly move more broadly and I you know sometimes sit for a while and mull and concentrate but I mostly move more broadly and I you know sometimes sit for a while and mull and concentrate but I mostly move around because that seems to be the way I add the most value it’s just the natural mode for me I struggle with that that basic thing I was a .NET developer in a previous life I like to say but I was looking at going into Ruby and basically leaving behind it was kind of an all-or-nothing move it was move over to Ruby and just totally focus on becoming a FOSS platform developer or stick with .NET which I had already invested a lot in right and then the decision it kind of crystallized was deep or wide yeah and some people like what you’re describing is a social networker likes to go wide likes to get a broad spectrum of experience and maybe just go just deep enough well deep enough to understand deep enough to understand what people what people care about most yeah but if you’re sometimes another type of personality and is there a word for that type of personality that is would be so that the social networker tends to span across is there a concept for the person that’s like I want to stay in this one vertical and just dig deep into that so I mean there are different personality classification systems and some of this I suppose is more introvert and extrovert yeah some of it is people whose thinking tends to be in shorter bursts like mine my thinking is constantly interrupted by fresh ideas and I work very hard to become more grounded and to concentrate more and to listen better but my natural way of thinking and communicating and learning is with lots and lots of inputs and lots and lots of outputs so chatty thinking yes exactly which can be you know inconvenient for me and inconvenient for people I work with but it has this cross-pollinating kind of broadcasting value to it I keep track of a lot of people so I like to say I’m not a great programmer but I have one of the best colleagues I’ve ever worked with and I have one of the best collections of friends who are great programmers ever and you have binders full of programmers well it’s all in my head and in my iPhone but in fact a little election joke there yes exactly so I I love I love it when an awesome programmer with an interesting idea doesn’t know about another awesome programmer in whatever tech stack or language or country or you know whatever doesn’t know about another programmer in another community with us with a related idea and I can connect them to each other and it’s not it’s not at all confined to programmers I made him members of lots of other kinds of community it’s a human thing and that’s really what the important thing to remember in these technical communities is we’ve picked a topic but we’re all people yeah and that’s one of things I like about with the soft craftsmanship is we’re encouraged to look outside of our own community and look at what other people are sure and how how the the carpenters craftsman how the dentist is a craftsman sure that that there’s that even my barber which I have to see more often is is a craftsman and then stuff you know because he has a skill and he practices it and teaches other people and sure they but even kind of a mentoring and he’s a little bit of an old-timey barber yeah and I’m old-timey barber but but that we have so much to learn from each other as people and that we shouldn’t just focus on our one little niche well I don’t know I think we don’t have to rely on individuals to master every variety of learning and interaction and it’s okay if we rely on balanced enough communities to take care of that not everyone should have to be a network weaver right and I’m some of you just need somebody could knuckle down and get a job done absolutely so you know a balanced software development team frequently has people like me who serve in roles of intermediating between developers and testers I do a lot of that and intermediating between developers and testers and product owners and operations people I care about every one of those different silos and roles and and their definitions of mastery I’m addicted to the notion of mastery generally so the guy this morning who got me the bacon yeah you know that guy was obviously a master chef yeah and he admitted it to me yeah and I enjoyed meeting him just for a minute or two and took his picture holding his beautiful tray of perfectly cooked bacon yeah because I was as pleased to meet a master chef out of nowhere as I would be to meet a master Ruby test driver yeah and that makes sense just so the people are watching his little context is where the SCNA conference and there’s the buffet of all the bread all the bread that they’re healthy yeah all the healthy food right and one of the people who’s preparing the chef the lead chef you wouldn’t know that just you know just comes out and asks if everything’s okay and and and Patrick just says I’d really love some bacon and the chef says and I’m sending there for it and he just let’s come with me and then they both run off and next you know there’s a tweet that got some bacon for my new friend and yes but and that’s a perfect memory the moment that’s the thing I cannot help doing is introducing myself to new people regardless of you know cab drivers right chefs software craftsman barbers I’ve written I got my haircut very recently and the guys who cut my hair are these like crazy 1950s slick back you know they have their own culture they all race hot rods yeah play electric guitar you know if I find an opportunity to talk to anybody who is obviously passionate about anything they do I will I’ll take advantage of it yeah well thank you very much for taking the time to sit down thank you Mike