Fieldstones and Ideas
Ideas
- Career - Reframing a bad faith question
- Product Management - My Start-Up Stack - Canvas, Impact Map, etc.
- Tensions - Mind map of tensions between groups
- Career - Skip levels
- Case Study - Offshore to Nearshore
- Create Slack in Your Process
- Improvement Anywhere is Worth It
- Phantom Dependencies (I can't turn on the TV because the remote is over there and I don't want to get it.)
- What everyone can do to start their next meeting better (Begin pillar of Facilitation with callouts to techniques, etc.)
- Fear of Failure - reko.day
- Mind map of why change is hard
- Developer Myths
- Quality slows you down. More upfront design will save you. Code reviews are a useful gate. Flow state is important. Pairing isn't effective. TDD isn't practical. Better requirements will help. Working horizontally is better than working vertically. Dividing and conquering is what you did to enemies to beat them and isn't how you should treat yourselves.
- Write about any one myth
Flow State
Directly on flow in software development:
- Ritonummi et al., "Flow Experience in Software Engineering" (ESEC/FSE 2023) — https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616263
- Ritonummi et al., "When the Flow is Just Too Much" (AIS THCI 2025) — https://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol17/iss3/5/
- Brown et al., "Using Logs Data to Identify Flow or Focused Work" (CHI 2023) — https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581562
Flow vs deliberate practice:
- Cal Newport summarizing Ericsson's position — https://calnewport.com/the-father-of-deliberate-practice-disowns-flow/
Practitioner critique:
- "Flow in Software Development is Overrated" — https://www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/flow-is-overrated.html
Neuroscience and theory:
- Neuroscience of Flow States (PMC) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7551835/
- Fostering Flow at Work Framework (PMC) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10360049/
- Investigating the Flow Experience: Key Issues (Frontiers) — https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00158/full
Adjacent:
- Creativity as Problem-Solving in Software Engineering (arxiv 2025) — https://arxiv.org/html/2502.03280v1
- Team Flow Conceptualization (Taylor & Francis) — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2018.1449729
The Ritonummi 2025 paper on adverse outcomes and the Brown et al. Google study are the two I'd start with if you're short on time.