Read me first!
Agility
This SubStack started out as a vehicle for writing a book: #No—a book about agility written in an agile way. The intent was to write chapters, you’ll (I hope) read them and give me feedback. I’ll then adjust, guided by the feedback. I’ve since expanded the notion to a blog about general agility, though I still plan to extract out much of what I’m writing here into a book.
Unlike most discussions concerning Agile, this substack will focus on “common wisdom” that isn’t all that wise, of the of-course-we-must-do things that you probably shouldn’t do at all. A litany of the bad is not useful, of course—we need actionable suggestions for improvement—so the main emphasis of the book will be change that “bad” into “good.” We have to identify the problems first, however.
I won’t be writing anything book like in strict sequence—one of the points of an incremental approach is to figure out what the best sequence is. Some of the initial chapters will be edited and expanded posts from holub.com/blog. Once I get enough material up here, I’ll put an outline/tentative-table-of-contents into another post, however, so you can get overview of the topics I have in mind.
What to expect as a paid subscriber
I’ve never done this sort of paid-subscription thing before, so expect things to change as we all learn (and please feel free to discuss), and expect occasional experiments.
I’m expecting that you’ll be coming here wanting to improve your agility, and I hope that what I’m writing is useful enough that you’ll be willing to chip in a little to cover my costs.
A lot of the things I’ll be saying are controversial in some circles, and what I’m hoping for is reasoned discussion and lots of questions. We’re all here to learn, or at least I am, but the best books of this sort answer questions, and I’m hoping that you’ll ask things that didn’t occur to me so that I can get the answers into the book. I’ll create a thread expressly for general questions, as compared to questions/comments about a specific chapter or section.
I expect to post once a week on average (sometimes more, sometimes less). That will get us to a finished book in a year or so—maybe less if I write more. The point of subscribing is that you don’t want to way for a year to get the material. You also get your questions answered in the book, and to introduce topics that I hadn’t thought about. I’m hoping that a community will form around the book as well.
The holub.com email list
SubStack is, itself, a mailing list, but you’re interested in notifications about classes and so forth, please consider subscribing to my announcements list at https://holub.com/subscribe. Thanks!