This month I want to highlight an article, The Tyranny of Nits – How open source work sputters and dies, by Leafwing Studios. Although this article contextualizes problems around open source development, it hits on several commonplace software development themes, such as motivating high performers, weeding out unintentionally undermining behaviors, and prioritizing forward progress. At Amazon, we find ourselves constantly navigating two competing paradigms: quickly deliver new and exciting features to customers, and deliver safe, secure, effective software that meets our worldwide obligations. While no team can meet all of these requirements with a single operating paradigm, we make a series of decisions every day to optimize for our desired outcomes. The authors of this article focus on making forward progress in the open source world by identifying root motivations and creating heuristics that help quickly identify how to resolve concerns (see the section labeled “a taxonomy of code concerns”). We can apply the same insights to our development processes, and weed out ineffective behaviors to deliver results.

https://www.leafwing-studios.com/blog/tyranny-of-nits

“…the limiting factor in open source isn’t time, and it isn’t effort. It’s ‘give-a-{{{f***}}}’. Get someone properly nerd sniped and they’ll spend entirely disproportionate effort trying to fix or improve open source projects…But when it feels like they’re being dragged down by pointless minutia, or can’t make progress, they’ll wander off in frustration and find something better to do.”