Destroy All Onions!

This week I’ve been on a course on Agile Development (or Agile Delivery, or whatever they want to call it). This time round, it looks like the brainwashing is taking hold much better, and I think I’m starting to accept it a bit.

The key principle that I’ve taken to is that of accepting improvement, not expecting perfection. I have all sorts of arguments against Agile, but when they are challenged against that principle, I have to acknowledge that we don’t do them perfectly now, and we will continue to not do them perfectly in the future, but we may not do them any worse, and it’s possible we may do them better under Agile. (That sentence was clearly too long. I apologise to any reader who suffered mental trauma in reading it.)

From my own perspective in software design, Agile definitely has a significant risk of getting the design wrong because enough time wasn’t taken over it, and then having to re-develop based on a corrected version. But this happens anyway. The difference is that in Agile, the developers should only get 2 weeks down the road before it will be spotted, so reversing it shouldn’t be a major crisis. Or at least that’s what the theory says anyway.

The idea of accepting improvement also seems like a reasonable idea in life. Often we over-analyse a situation trying to find a perfect outcome, which may not actually exist or be achievable. Sometimes, it’s enough that things get better.

I guess if I’m going to live in Northern Ireland and have a blog, I’d better say something about the announcement last week of Ian Paisley’s resignation from front-line politics.

It’s a big deal for Northern Ireland. For as long as I have lived (and longer) he has been the single constant fact of local politics. Northern Ireland politics without Ian Paisley is almost unthinkable, as he has been such a feature for such a long time. Having continued until now (at the age of 81) I’d started assuming he’d go on until he died.

And I have to admit that I had reckoned for years that we’d never see progress in Northern Ireland until Paisley died, such was his unremitting opposition to anything that he believed threatened the status of Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom.

But I was wrong. Recently Ian did the last thing anyone expected, and changed his mind. He went into government with his political enemies, and has been successfully working with them. I truly never believed that it could happen, and he has earned my respect for doing it. The irony of course is that at the same time he has lost the respect of many of his supporters, but that’s another story.

It’s much too early to say what his legacy will be – after all, he still has a couple of months to go, and anything could happen. But I hope that among everything else, he will be remembered for showing us that the two sides of our divided community really can work together. If Ian Paisley can set aside a long history of enmity and work with former IRA members, then maybe there really is hope for Northern Ireland after all.

I suppose this would be a good time to introduce myself. My name is Norwin (this is an actual name, as provided for me by my parents, and not an internet nickname, just so you know), and I live in Belfast.

I work in the IT industry, I’m a Christian, and I don’t like onions. These facts are not related. I’d rather like a religion that hated onions, but I suppose I wouldn’t like one that forced its adherents to write software, even though I might quite like it myself.

I’m not convinced that the world either wants or needs to know what I think about it, and the many things it contains. The world certainly hasn’t shown much interest in or respect for my opinions in the past. However my friend Karen is a fairly prolific blogger, and she encouraged me to start one when I visited her last year. And so here we are.

I don’t have any particular plans for this blog in terms of content, so I can’t give you a thrilling preview of what’s to come, or even the themes that may develop. To be honest, I’ll be surprised if anyone but me reads it.
But we’ll see what happens. Good night.