Mentor #6: Amitai Schleier

Welcome back to Agile Tribe of Mentors. I've been quiet for a while as I've been getting a brand new agile conference off the ground (http://www.leanagilebrighton.co.uk). That's been taking up most of my spare time/ energy as you can imagine. However, I still have a few mentor posts in the pipeline that I've been meaning to get around to posting. Here is the first!

Amitai Schleier is another great example of how amazing our agile community is. We've never met, he reached out via twitter when he spotted the blog (following on from the awesome GeePaw Hill post) and he willingly and generously contributed his own response. Its also another great example of how beneficial this exercise has been for me, seeking other sources of knowledge and making connections with folks I might not typically get a chance to connect with. That's kind of the entire point of this initiative :)

If you get the chance I recommend you subscribe to Amitai's podcast "Agile in 3 minutes"

About Amitai Schleier

Amitai Schleier (@schmonz) is a software development coach, legacy code wrestler, non-award-winning musician, and award-winning bad poet. He publishes fixed-length micropodcasts at Agile in 3 Minutes, writes variable-length articles at schmonz.com, and contributes code and direction to notable open-source projects such as NetBSD, pkgsrc, ikiwiki, and qmail. Amitai’s ideas, prose, music, and puns have manifested at Agile Roots,Agile for Humans, CodeMash, Self.conference, pkgsrcCon, Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, NYCBUG, the International Rachmaninoff Conference, and theAlfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.


Here is Amitai's advice ..

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read.

• The Goal (Goldratt)
• XP Explained (Beck)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers)
• Mob Programming Guidebook (Pyhäjärvi & Falco)
 

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media)

• @estherderby
• @ruthmalan
• @catswetel
• @SalFreudenberg
• @lanettecream

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

Software is a human activity. To get better at writing software together, we have to get better at being human together.


What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

Write code. Make music. Go for a walk. Write a particularly scathing episode of Agile in 3 Minutes.

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?

Got a release rejected by IT for what seemed like piddling reasons. We knew why we were confident in it. Ops didn't, and wasn't. Next week we paired with Ops to develop a feature. After that, we always got the green light.


What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

My advice: doubt yourselves enough to try something, and trust yourselves enough to judge whether to keep it. Ideas aren't worth more because of where they came from, worth less because of how counter-intuitive they sound, or worth anything until you make them your own.


What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

I'd like to see more organizations recognizing the primacy of humane relationships and reorganizing accordingly. I'd like to see more people feel that their whole human selves are valued and needed in the workplace and that their work is valued and needed in the world.

Thank you Amitai