There was some discussion on the Growstuff IRC channel last night, while I was asleep, about the term “spike”. I use it a bit on the Growstuff project but I don’t think everyone knows what I’m getting at, possibly because I picked it up by osmosis from the Extreme Programming community over a decade ago, and the term’s fallen out of favour since then. So here’s a quick definition as I use it: A spike is experimental. It’s for writing something you’ve never written before, Continue reading → One of the best things about leading my own project has been not having to pretend I’m some sort of shit hot programmer. It’s nice to be able to to say “argh, that’s too hard, fuck it” or “I have no idea how this works” without worrying about my performance review. Of course, I also like to claim that I’m providing a visible example that it’s okay not to be perfect or know everything, to help make it less scary for our newer contributors. But Continue reading → It’s about time we went beyond “hey, knitting patterns are kind of like code” and looked more deeply at the kinds of technical skills that really make knitting like programming. Continue reading →