Talk video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9I4loWogqw

Excerpts:

One camerata emerged inside ThoughtWorks (consultancy) in London around 2003–2006. This group gave us Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, DevOps. They weren’t all on the same project, but they talked to each other, and they solved the problem of: Does deployment have to be so hard?

Jez and Dan and Chris Read produced The Deployment Production Line. Later, Dan went to invent BDD, Sam Newman became a prophet of microservices, and more...

The Composition
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Jessica Kerr
Symmathecist, developer, speaker, mother, crazy nut. Atomist. Learning and growing. All tweets are mine, licensed CC0. she/her
Apr 16
the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming
(latest video, or the original keynote)

At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins of Opera.

Part 1: Examples
The Camerata
The Florentine Camerata were a group of people who met in Florence in the 16th century. They had a huge impact on history and on each other.

(Caveat: I’m not a student of music or music history. I listened to this Great Course and heard about this Camerata and noticed a resemblance to some teams I’ve seen and been in. So I looked it up further, and came upon Collective “Problem-Solving” in the History of Music: the Case of the Camerata by Dr. Ruth Katz in the Journal of the History of Ideas, and toward the end of it my mind was blown. More on that later.)

Camerata literally means a small orchestra or choir. This Camerata was a diverse group of people who gathered and worked on a common problem: they were bored with polyphony, the esteemed music of their day. (Sample: Palestrina) Polyphony is very pretty: it has around four melodies, each of equal importance. Each has a logic of its own, rather than melody and accompaniment. Polyphony is intellectually rewarding, but you need technical understanding to appreciate it fully. What feeling it conveys comes through auditory qualities.

The Camerata asked the revolutionary question: what if you could understand the words?

Methods
The Camerata included (all quotes in this style are from Katz)

musicians, artists, poets, astrologers, philosophers, scientists
who met informally under the aegis of Bardi and Corsi.
People with diverse skills and perspectives worked together. They had sponsorship; Giovanni d’Bardi was Count of Venoa, and loved to surround himself with interesting people.

Their aim was to reform the polyphonic music of the day
and they believed that the best way to do so was to renovate the ancient Greek practice of setting words to music
They shared a common goal; they were unsatisfied with what Vincenzo Galilei (member of the Camerata, father of Galileo) called “that corrupt and incomprehensible contemporary music.”

And they had a common strategy. They didn’t really know what the Greeks did, but this lent legitimacy to their ideas. Like citing computer science papers from the 70s.

Their real high-level objective was horizonal, and more specific than moving away from polyphony:

Their principal aim was to find the optimum formula for wedding words and music.
Here, “optimum” is measured as “maximally effective in communicating… the specific meanings and emotions appropriate to the text.”

Qualities
The Camerata talked a lot, and listened to each other talk.

“I learned more from their learned discussions than I learned from descant in over thirty years” — Caccini, renowned singer
(I had to look up “descant.” It means long-winded discourse. Like you’re experiencing now, sorry.)

But they weren’t all talk.

the Camerata constituted not only a forum for theoretical discussions, but also a workshop, a “laboratory” for the creation and performance of music.
They practiced together! And experimented. The beginning of the scientific method is a big part of the Renaissance, and it intertwines with art. We have a new way of thinking, ways of asking the universe questions. Vincenzo Galilei varied lengths and tensions of strings and found the ratios that make chords.

The Camerata didn’t always get along. There was rivalry between Bardi and Corsi, the two chief sponsors. Bardi preferred talking, Corsi wanted to play more music. These feed each other. There was disagreement over style between Caccini and Peri, the two musical stars. Peri wanted to focus on the words, with a bit of music; Caccini wanted the singing to stand out, while also understanding the words. These tensions lead to a balance.

They did code review!

presentations made… were commented on formally by “defenders” and “censors” who were nominated for the occasion.
I like that criticism came from people designated to the role, not the asshole who doesn’t like you and takes it out on your code. (Technically, this took place in the Alterati, another meetup with a lot of the same people.)

Outcomes
Over the years, this team changed history. They invented the music-drama, and a style of music that conveyed more meaning. (Sample: Monteverdi, a first composer to adopt the Camerata’s style. If you know Italian, you can probably understand the words.)

What about the individuals? Their outcomes were exceptional too! Here are some of their publications:

As composers of operas and authors of scientific treatises, these half-dozen people are fewer than half of the Camerata members who have Wikipedia articles. Really, what are the chances, if you’re alive in the sixteenth century, that you have a Wikipedia article today? These people did pretty well for themselves. They grew out of the Camerata.

Also in Science
This pattern of a group of people coming together to solve a problem is not unique to music — it’s the common case.

the Camerata resembles the kind of “invisible college” which is the key to creativity in science.
This “invisible college” is an association of people who share ideas. Who build a new reality together, then spread it to advance the wider culture.

We like to give the Nobel Prize to one or two people. But who worked in their lab? Who did they correspond with?

When Jon Von Neumann went to Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, so did two or three mathematicians that he went to high school with. Really, you grow up in Hungary, what are your chances of getting to Los Alamos? They built each other up.

These invisible colleges share:

tacit understandings concerning appropriate methods of research
(processes and values)

priority problems
(this means they fight over who was first; more on this later)

and the shorthand communication which shared work implies.
We can move quickly together because we share common ground, compatible mental models. This is super fun, when I get to this point with my team.

Also in Art
People work together to develop their individual styles. Usually in Paris, it seems.

the salon, the coffeehouse, the café as breeding places of artistic creativity
In the nineteenth century, a group of artists broke from the mainstream and developed Impressionism.

coping with a common puzzle which they, separately and as a group, tried to solve
Van Gogh lived in the Montmartre district with the other artists and dealers and critics. When I visited his museum in Amsterdam, my favorite part was all the paintings by his friends and associates; they developed each other as painters.

One of these (my personal favorite) was Paul Gauguin, the one Van Gogh cut his ear off over. Gauguin went on to influence Picasso.

Picasso was at the center of many social circles in Paris over the decades. Writers, photographers, philosophers.

One painter who dipped in and out of his camerata was Aleksandra Ekster, who took the ideas of Cubism back to Kiev, where her studio was its own place of idea exchange.

One of her high school classmates and friends was Alexander Bogomazov, and a print of his lives on my bedroom wall.

my own little museum. includes “Head” by Bogomazov next to a piece by my daughter
This brings us to the modern day, where we can find examples of this phenomenon in software teams.

Also in Software
One camerata emerged inside ThoughtWorks (consultancy) in London around 2003–2006. This group gave us Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, DevOps. They weren’t all on the same project, but they talked to each other, and they solved the problem of: Does deployment have to be so hard?

Jez and Dan and Chris Read produced The Deployment Production Line. Later, Dan went to invent BDD, Sam Newman became a prophet of microservices, and more. I keep meeting conference speakers who were part of this group.

Another example: the early Spring team, around the same time. They came together online, from all around the world, to solve the problem of: do we really have to use J2EE? and made Java development less painful for everyone. Today, Java development is (approximately) everywhere, and Spring is everywhere Java is.

That group of developers and businesspeople produced an inordinate number of founders and CEOs and partners.