J. B. Rainsberger

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT J. B. RAINSBERGER

Trusted Adviser and Shoulder to Cry On to technical leaders at all levels of the software development industry, from emerging team and technical leaders to CTOs, fractional and otherwise. Well. mainly. I help software development professionals of all kinds navigate their jobs and their careers. Due to the trajectory of my career, programmers find me most often, typically through my past work on Evolutionary Design and Test-Driven Development (TDD) as well as Surviving Legacy Code. I primarily help individuals better interact with their environments, including their peers, their reports (if they have any), and the constraints around them. I do this entirely free of blame and judgment. Work groups also hire me for purely programming-based workshops, such as refactoring, programmer testing (especially adding tests to existing code), and implementing behavior more incrementally. Companies also hire me for introductory training courses in Evolutionary Design/TDD, Surviving Legacy Code, and Dealing with Regret in Software Design. Most of my work with programmers starts with trying to tackle a programming task, then pretty soon we reach an issue of some kind. I ask,\"Couldn\'t it be as simple as X?\" and they reply,\"It would be, if it weren\'t for Y!\" And \"Y\" here is usually a person or a policy acting as an apparent obstacle. From that point, we are dealing with so-called \"people problems\", rather than technical problems. After we reach a satisfactory conclusion, we reward ourselves with some time focusing on design or testing or something else we can actually get done today. My philosophy is a mixture of Incremental & Iterative Development with roots in Theory of Constraints as well as Humane Work in the tradition of Virginia Satir, Nancy Kline, Roger Martin, Patrick Lencioni, and Edward Deci. I especially work in the grand tradition of Jerry Weinberg, seeing software development primarily as a human-social activity. The best ways to work with me are these- An individual works with me and I help them guide the organization around them- A group works with me and I help them build habits to deliver software more effectively- An organization hires me to provide training to a larger audience, in order to expose them all to the same ideas at once- An organization invites me to give a talk, with the goal of breathing new life into a group running low on optimism and hope. This always includes an extensive Q&A period that helps us identify concrete ways for them to make progress on the job.