Week 424 - Interesting links

Leading Wisely Podcast with Ricardo Semler

I’ve long been a fan of Semler’s book Maverick!: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace which, despite the very cheesy cover, is a fascinating account of how he transformed Brazilian company Semco into a democratically run, decentralised organisation. I’d not kept up with what Semler has done since writing his book, but recently discovered this podcast where he interviews people who run businesses in interesting ways. The interviews are a bit abstract at times but there’s also a lot of interesting stories and concrete advice too. Episode 1 and 2 feature Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from Basecamp. — CL

The Product Development Triathlon

I’m really interested in Kent Beck’s latest approach to software development which he’s calling Explore, Expand, and Extract (or “3X” for short). Since this original article, he’s been writing a series of articles, Comparing Explore, Expand, and Extract: Topics in 3X, which compare how he thinks things like estimation, testing, and team organisation, should be used differently across the three phases. — JM

Cooperative Technologists official launch

The Cooperative Technologists (CoTech) are a network of worker-run cooperatives in the technology and digital sector. Go Free Range are a proud founding member and we talked about attending the first CoTech retreat back in Week 409. Since then the network has become more official with a set of services that are used to collaborate and communicate internally and a shiny new website which tells the public more about how we work and how you can work with us. — CL

Stripe: Bring Your Own Team

We’re passionate believers in the power of a strong team, greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed this is one of the things that distinguishes Go Free Range from a loose collection of freelancers. Anyway, it’s interesting to see that big companies like Stripe and Flickr are now exploring the avenue of recruiting teams of developers. — JM

Positive News

I heard about this online & print magazine in one of the sessions at the Open 2017 conference. It aims to report the news constructively: “focussing on progress and possibility”. Most interesting to me is that it’s a limited company owned by a cooperative of journalists, readers and advertisers. The cooperative defines the editorial principles in a charter, while the limited company operates editorial independence within the charter. — JM