The Conference of the Fearless

Nobody quite remembered why they were called the fearless.

Some claimed it was because they travelled great distances to stand before several hundred craftspeople and explain things that had seemed considerably more obvious while preparing the slides. Others believed it was because they willingly performed live demonstrations in front of an audience.

The Witch considered the second explanation entirely sufficient.

The gathering was called the Guild of Travelling Orators.

It attracted architects, programmers, masters, apprentices, scholars, merchants, and people whose job titles required surprisingly small letters on their name badges.

They came to tell stories, and they were magnificent stories.

One scholar spoke of the Great Dragons of the West, creatures sitting upon such enormous mountains of gold that they had begun investing it in young enterprises whose purpose was remarkably difficult to explain.

“They are worth twelve billion crowns,” said the Apprentice.

“What do they make?”

There was a pause.

“Mostly presentations explaining why they are worth twelve billion crowns.”

The Witch nodded.

“A mature business model.”

Elsewhere, craftspeople reported their experiences working with Aitch-Two-Oh, the increasingly capable construct that had recently appeared throughout the Kingdom.

Some called it an assistant, others an agent. Still others called it a colleague.

One craftsman explained that he spent his days pairing with it.

“So you work together?” asked the Witch.

“Yes.”

“You discuss alternatives?”

“Sometimes.”

“You challenge each other’s assumptions?”

“Well.”

“You learn from each other?”

“Certainly. Mostly it learns from everything.”

“And when it produces nonsense?”

“I correct it.”

“And when you produce nonsense?”

The craftsman hesitated.

The Witch scratched the cat behind its ears.

“Perhaps only one of you is pairing.”

There were also craftspeople who spoke of an astonishingly radical way of working.

Whenever they changed their work, they brought that change together with everyone else’s almost immediately.

The Apprentice listened carefully.

“You mean they don’t keep their work separate for three weeks?”

“No.”

“And they don’t create several additional branches so that everyone can work independently?”

“Apparently not.”

“And then they don’t finally bring everything together shortly before release?”

“No.”

The Apprentice looked concerned.

“When do they integrate, then?”

“Continuously.”

“That sounds suspiciously like Continuous Integration.”

“Names occasionally outlive their definitions,” said the Witch.

And then there were the others.

They were almost disappointing.

They had no dragons.

No revolutionary machines.

No enormous transformation programme.

No framework with seven differently coloured boxes.

They talked about behaviour.

Small changes.

Pairing.

Feedback.

Talking to users.

Keeping the work releasable.

Removing unnecessary complexity.

Bringing work together early.

Observing what happened.

And then doing it again.

They seemed almost like extras in the grand spectacle of technological progress.

Which, the Apprentice thought, was perhaps a little mean.

So he asked the Witch.

“Why are they here?”

The Witch looked across the hall.

“Because they do the work.”

“Everyone here does the work.”

“Of course.”

She watched another speaker explain how his team had carefully changed a system, observed what happened, discovered that they had been wrong, and changed it again.

“No transformation?”

“No.”

“No revolution?”

“No.”

“No ten-year prediction about the future of our craft?”

“Apparently not.”

The Apprentice frowned.

“That doesn’t sound particularly fearless.”

The Witch smiled.

“Stand before a room full of clever people and tell them that your greatest insight is to integrate your work every few minutes.”

She pointed towards the stage.

“Tell architects that sometimes the best architecture lies in a decision you haven’t made yet.”

Another speaker walked past them.

“Tell programmers that producing more code might not be progress.”

Another passed by, carrying a laptop covered in stickers.

“Tell managers that uncertainty cannot be removed by adding more detail to a plan.”

Then Aitch-Two-Oh rolled past.

“And tell everyone that having a machine capable of producing answers very quickly makes it more important — not less — to know whether those answers are any good.”

The Apprentice considered this.

“That could make people uncomfortable.”

“Precisely.”

That evening, the fearless left the conference hall and disappeared into the beautiful streets of the city.

Some carried new techniques with them.

Some new questions.

Some books.

Some stickers.

And some carried ideas they had been absolutely certain about that morning, but were now considerably less certain about.

The Witch considered this an excellent outcome.

The Apprentice was still thinking about the name.

“So that’s why they call it the Conference of the Fearless?”

“Oh, no,” said the Witch.

“I have no idea why they call it that.”

She pulled her coat tighter against the northern wind.

“But bringing together people who are willing to show what they actually do, what they learned from doing it, and occasionally where they were wrong …”

She looked back at the conference hall.

“… would be a rather good reason.”