Dragan Stepanović
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dstepanovic.bsky.social
Dragan Stepanović
@dstepanovic.bsky.social
Trying hard not to think about small batches, bottlenecks, and systems. In the meantime: XP, ToC, Lean, Systems Thinking.

Moved here from that other place for good.
🍩 economy instead of "numbers go up"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhcr...
A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth
YouTube video by TED
www.youtube.com
November 17, 2025 at 4:01 PM
If you set out to reduce accidental complexity, but then overreach and start trying to reduce essential complexity without realizing it, you're in for a ride.

Oversimplifying complex reality and just-ism ("let's not complicate, it's just this") to something that it's not will be very painful.
November 15, 2025 at 4:26 PM
November 12, 2025 at 5:47 PM
Smaller changes that we get with refactoring (original meaning of the term) and incremental/emergent design, also help with moving faster as a group, because it's way easier to agree on a smaller step forward than a bigger step forward.

1/2
November 6, 2025 at 1:19 PM
There's a huge difference between

optimizing for making bigger changes faster

and

optimizing for making smaller changes more frequently.

Lean towards the latter, even though most of the industry is trying very hard to find ways to do the former.
November 5, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Dragan Stepanović
Mamdani: "We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him."
November 5, 2025 at 4:38 AM
Nobody ever got promoted for solving an exponential problem in its lag (still slow growth) phase.
November 1, 2025 at 8:14 AM
The problem with any economies of scale is that the immediate cost savings they provide obscure the costs of a lack of local resiliency, which are observed only later.

And it's far from guaranteed that the latter won't be higher than the former.
October 30, 2025 at 11:48 AM
It's amusing to observe the sheer amount of "Not Invented Here Syndrome" present in "BigTech" companies by the extent of different language used for already ubiquitous terms and ideas in the industry.
October 30, 2025 at 10:14 AM
If you can't change design cheaply because refactoring skills are lacking, you're less likely to end up with a suitable design for a given problem that emerges from insights you get as a byproduct of refactoring.

1/2
October 25, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Dragan Stepanović
Reminder: the Call for Sessions for next year's Agile Manchester conference in May is currently open: agilemanchester.net/call-for-ses...

/ @agilemanc.bsky.social #agilemanc
Call for Sessions
Our Agile Manchester 2026 Call for Sessions is open
agilemanchester.net
October 1, 2025 at 11:50 AM
Reposted by Dragan Stepanović
September 27, 2025 at 1:44 PM
One important questions to ask is: "What amount of domain insights are you missing out on by handing off creating the changes to the machine?".

Can you quantify that? :) Way more difficult, if not impossible, compared to "saved X hours creating this feature using AI".

1/2
September 27, 2025 at 7:33 PM
fuck yeah
September 27, 2025 at 7:12 PM
I often ask myself if a technology, beside lowering the costs for which lowering the costs is beneficial, is also lowering the costs for which lowering the costs is detrimental.

1/4
September 27, 2025 at 7:09 PM
What are the costs and implications of a fragmented mental model of a domain across the team that you get as a result of people working in isolation?
September 23, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Dragan Stepanović
The only way to protect your future is by taxing the billionaires more.

At the @makethempay.bsky.social rally today.
September 20, 2025 at 6:04 PM
The tyranny of economic growth obsession.
September 16, 2025 at 3:10 PM
As American farmers would say, Trump is making Brazil great again. 🍿
September 14, 2025 at 12:33 PM
"When you hear an Anarcho-capitalist or Libertarian or Neoliberal speak of freedom, know that they are not talking about your individual freedoms. They are talking about the freedom of capital to exploit and corrupt, and making your government a servant of the capitalists and not you the citizens."
September 12, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Dragan Stepanović
When I am elected, I will read the code DOGE wrote. I will find out how they stole your data and what they have done with it.

And then I will tell you
September 8, 2025 at 3:40 PM
It's amazing how much teams and companies can achieve when they have wrong goals set.
September 3, 2025 at 4:09 PM
If I had a € for every set of command + handler + response classes that should've been just a method in an existing application service...
August 26, 2025 at 11:05 AM