This was originally published internally on 4 Dec 2015, my 4th day at CSC:

My first few days have made me think carefully about where I see value.

This is what’s emerging:

1. I value code with documentation, samples and examples more than just code, because code with documentation, samples and examples gives us a repeatable offering that we can take to market.
2. I value code more than slides, because code gives us a prototype that we can take to a brave customer who’s willing to share risk.
3. I value slides more than ideas, because slides give us a way to share concepts and engage with customers about what might be.
4. I value ideas on their own least of all, which is not to say that ideas have no value. Ideas are what drive us forward, and DXC Technology is full of brilliant people with great ideas – I just want to see the best ones evolve as quickly as possible into code with documentation, samples and example.

BTW code, and it’s documentation, samples and examples lives in a repository such as GitHub – if you’re not already using Git (and GitHub) then learn about it here – Learn Git | Codecademy

Retrospective

After just a few days it was already clear to me that far too much ‘solutioning’ was being done in PowerPoint rather than tools that could touch a production environment. Those slides were worthless compared to code. Not completely worthless, but definitely worth less. Of course code on its own isn’t great either, as successful projects need great documentation, samples and examples; a theme that I return to later.

Original comments

CN:

+1 Chris :-)

There was a great session from EMC and Puppet at VMworld which said think of Github/Version-Controlled code as “Live Documentation”.

The presenter made everyone promise never to log in to a server again before we left!

Whilst it’s not possible to stick to that when you have legacy customers on systems that can’t, yet, accept any change to them to be pushed out centrally it’s a great goal to have in the back of your mind when doing anything.  “If this change works it need to go back into the build code/docs”