Let's talk about the last 12 years of software, i.e. 2007 on.
Users, designers, programmers, product managers—come one, come all! It's going to be a party!
A retrospective is a regularly-held meeting, common at software companies, where the participants discuss their work experiences of the past week or month or whatever. It's a time to figure out what's going well and what's not, and perhaps commit to making changes. A bit like a New Year's party where everyone talks about their resolutions, except it happens way more often and some of the resolutions actually stick.
Normally what happens in a retrospective is a team goes into a meeting room and everyone writes down their thoughts and feelings about the past week as brief statements on a whiteboard. Each item goes into one of three categories: "Happy", "Confused/Concerned", or "Sad/Angry". The group votes on which items are most important to talk about, and then... they just talk about them. For like an hour. And they come up with ways to make things better next week.
This retrospective is going to be a bit different because there's no whiteboard or time limit. It will be massively parallel, asynchronous, and distributed. And it's going to happen entirely within this GitHub repository!
I don't know when the software industry last sat down, took a good look in the mirror, and had a real heart-to-heart with itself. I'm guessing... never? Probably never. So this is pretty long overdue.
We've collectively learned a lot about how to build software over the last twelve years. We have also, I suspect, forgotten a lot. By cataloging our best and worst experiences, I hope to distill some sort of understanding of where software engineering should focus its attention next—an understanding based not on what we wish were true or what we want to feel, but on what's actually true; what we actually feel.
(Why the last twelve years, specifically? I dunno, 2007 seems like a turning point of sorts. Facebook, the iPhone, jQuery... all of this stuff was taking off. And it was a memorable year for me personally.)
Here's how it's gonna go down:
- Think about your interactions with software, programming, and perhaps computing devices in general over the last 12 years.
- What memories stand out as good or bad?
- What made you go "wow"?
- What disappointed you?
- What just plain made you angry?
And looking forward to the future:
- what are you excited for?
- What are you worried about?
- What do you wish you could tell everyone in the software industry, if only they would listen?
- Open an issue here to record your thoughts. You need a GitHub account to do this. If you want inspiration, I've already created some some example issues.
- Label your issue according to how it made you feel, using the "Labels" button on the right.
- Discuss the issues with other people by leaving comments on them!
- Remember that this repo is public. Don't post any confidential information here.
- Be kind. Criticize ideas, not people. Talk about specifics; give examples if you can. Speak from your own experience; let other people speak from theirs.
- This should go without saying, but: no threats, harrassment, hate speech, or spamming, or I'll ban you.
- You get to vent, and talk about your awesome ideas for how to make software better.
- You might meet someone cool.
- Your opinions will influence what I work on in my spare time. You might influence other people too, but I can't make any promises for them.