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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day.

You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.

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Same. Out of 15 shops I worked for this was absolutely different (2017-2018) and the only place I've seen pair programming and TDD done right. Once we managed to deploy first version of a trading product with no bugs at all.

When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements.

But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to.

Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.

I heard this from other people that worked on Pivotal. Must have been a cool eng team.

Some of the best people I've ever worked with. Still friends with many of them to this day.

> How to polish a turd over time.

You mean iterating and pivoting.

No, I mean taking a turd, which was the Cloud Foundry codebase that Pivotal inherited (aka purchased), and polishing it to be something that actually worked.

It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.

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