Sensible defaults: A way to think about our technology practices

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you work in technology, you're constantly making decisions: not just what you should do, but also how you should do it. That's why we developed the concept of "sensible defaults" — practices and technology decisions that we generally see — in most scenarios — as the right way to do things.

Although we've been talking about sensible defaults internally for a few years now, we recently decided to share them publicly on our website. We did so because we believe it can help organizations think through their own approach to technology decision-making, something which is becoming increasingly challenging in a rapidly changing and complex world.

So, to discuss sensible defaults and explain precisely why we want to share them with the world, hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage are joined by Brandon Cook and Kief Morris, two Thoughtworkers that played an important role in putting our sensible defaults together. They discuss the origins of the sensible default idea, some examples, as well as the challenges of putting them into practice.

Explore Thoughtworks' sensible defaults: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/topic/sensible-defaults

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast.
0:11.7	I am one of your regular hosts, Ken McGrath.
0:14.2	I'm joined today by Dr. Rebecca Parsons.
0:17.4	Hello, everyone.
0:18.8	I'm Rebecca Parsons, another one of your recurring hosts and CTO
0:23.4	emerita here at ThoughtWorks.
0:25.4	Great. So today we have a pretty cool topic. We recently published something we call
0:29.3	our sensible defaults on our website. So we wanted to talk to a couple of our community
0:33.6	leaders about what that means. So first off, let me introduce Brandon Cook.
0:38.8	Hey, I'm Brandon Cook. I'm the global community of practice lead for software development.
0:44.1	Welcome. And Keith Morris. Hi there. I'm Keith. I'm the global community of practice lead for
0:50.2	infrastructure engineering. And so first off, let's start with just a definition.
0:54.6	I guess either one of you.
0:56.2	I know we don't tend to use the word, the words best practice for multiple reasons.
1:02.6	What is a sensible default?
1:04.8	So a sensible default is basically something that we think is generally a good idea,
1:14.6	barring some reason why, you know, your particular situation, it might not be, right? So it's like, by default, like, for example,
1:21.0	we think it's a good idea to pair a program. And so unless there's some reason why that's not
1:26.4	feasible, you know, we would just go ahead and do that.
1:30.3	What does it not mean?
1:32.3	It's not something that like you must do.
1:35.6	You're going to be punished for not doing.
	...

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