Last night I finally got around to watching Erik Meijer’s keynote from last year’s Reaktor conference. It was called “One Hacker Way” and, while it contains much that is apocryphal – or at least wildly inaccurate – it scores over the older, more pedestrian type of keynote in two important ways: first it is highly contentious, and second, Erik sports a bright, tie-dyed T-shirt.
Some of the highlights of this personal rant were:
- “Agile is a cancer”
- “TDD is for pussies”
- Stand-ups eat into valuable coding time
- Coders should be treated (and paid) like professional athletes
- Hierarchical structures work for the army and the church, so they must be good
There were times that I found myself nodding in agreement, though – when he compared Scrum certification to a pyramid selling scheme, for instance – but mostly it was just opinion, conspicuously lacking the support of empirical data (which was one of his criticisms of agile).
I could go on, but if you’re still interested then I recommend you just go watch the video.
My final thought is that whole experience was vaguely reminiscent of a scene from the excellent movie “Glengarry Glen Ross”, where Alec Baldwin’s character harangues the dejected real-estate salesmen:
F*** YOU, that’s my name!! You know why, mister? ‘Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name!! And your name is “you’re wanting”. And you can’t play in a hacker‘s game. You can’t write code. Then go home home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life! Checking in code! You hear me, you f***in’ faggots? [Blake flips over a blackboard which has letters on it: ABC] A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Coding. Always be coding! Always be coding!
And, if you’re over 32 (when Erik says you’re too old to code) you can always go ranting on the conference circuit 😉
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