Confluence

How many streams are flowing into this confluence?

I asked Ward if this confluence we're in feels familiar given his experience with OOP, Design Patterns, Smalltalk, XP, and Wiki. He reflected on how it feels similar.

Jami in Dayton, Takashi in Pattern Languages, and Woods et. al. in Theory of Graceful Extensibility are all people pushing hard on difficult problems. They're coming from very different places but they're heading towards the same place.

We knew someday everyone would have a computer on their desk. A few people had them already. Then Alexander says we've been building for thousands of years. How did we figure that out? It turned out to be a lot of trial and error. Smalltalk shows up and is clearly ten years ahead of anything before it. And I had it on my desk. There was also all this stuff Carver Mead was doing with integrated circuits. I just wanted to understand all of this stuff—how circuit design was changing and so on. Then I met Kent who was similarly motivated and every time we did something in Smalltalk we learned something. We had an environment at Tektronix where we could stumble into this. Then we created OOPSLA and felt like we were applying systems and languages. It took a number of years to recruit other people into the discovery of other patterns. Agile sprung out of this exploration of patterns because you could work with your customer to discover a pattern language to describe their business problem.

Here we are at New Relic with early access to large scale computing. We're not the largest, but among the first. Three decades have gone by since the birth of personal computing. We're now somewhere new.

Tempo Interruptions are something Agile does not understand or know. Theory of Graceful Extensibility does seem to understand.

A confluence is a good place to grow a city.