№ 01 — Ron Jeffries
“It breaks my heart to see the ideas we wrote about in the Agile Manifesto used to make developers’ lives worse, instead of better.”
File · 01 — Diagnostic
We’re agile.
Why doesn’t it feel
like it?
The daily standup is fifteen minutes and still too long. The board has columns nobody moves cards into. Retro turned into a ritual where the team writes the same three complaints and the same three action items nothing happens to.
You’ve been told this is agility. A framework was rolled out. Certifications were earned. The velocity chart goes up, then down, then nobody looks at it. Releases still slip. Engineers still feel like the process is something done to them, not with them.
It’s not you. The Agile Manifesto was 17 developers saying one thing: trust motivated people and let understanding emerge from the work. The industry that grew on top of it sells the opposite.
Read the signatories themselves
№ 02 — Martin Fowler
“The Agile Industrial Complex imposing methods on people is an absolute travesty.”
№ 03 — Dave Thomas
“The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless. Agile is not a noun, it’s an adjective, and it must qualify something else.”
№ 04 — Andy Hunt
“The word ‘agile’ has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing ‘flaccid agile,’ a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly.”
№ 05 — Allen Holub
“You can implement Scrum perfectly and not be in the least bit agile.”
File · 02 — Reframe
Schema-F Scrum is not agile.
Agility is what the manifesto actually meant: trust motivated people and let understanding emerge from the work. Not a ceremony calendar. Not a velocity target. Not a certification pipeline. Not a framework stamped onto a team it doesn’t fit.
That is the mistake repeated in German engineering teams for forty years. The job isn’t to install more process. The job is to find the two or three practices that actually produce value — and drop the rest.
Consulting for agility. Not for the Agile Industrial Complex.
File · 03 — Engagement shapes
How we work together.
Outcomes, not deliverables. No retainer trap. Scoped explicitly.
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01
AI Adoption Review
A shortlist of AI moves that fit your product, stack and team — with effort and risk estimates you can defend in the next board meeting.
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02
In-House Upskilling Sprints
Pair-programming, reviews, dedicated spikes around a real problem — on your codebase, with your people. Not a workshop deck.
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03
Architecture Second Opinion
A written argument — what’s working, what’s decaying, what moves next — plus a senior voice neither selling you a replatform nor defending the status quo.
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04
Pragmatic Delivery Review
For teams stuck in ceremony theater. We find the practices that produce value, recommend what to drop — starting from the Agile Manifesto, not the framework textbook.
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05
Hands-on Engineering (selective)
When the problem is nested enough that a tool-hire makes sense, I take on the build, pair with your team, and hand it back fully documented.
File · 04 — Artefacts
Things I’ve already built and shipped —
because I’d rather show than claim.
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Recognized F# Expert
F# Software Foundation · Applied F# 2019.
foundation.fsharp.org ↗ -
FsHttp
Invited by Don Syme, creator of F#, into the official
fsprojects/FsHttp ↗fsprojectsorg. 499★, 128 dependent packages. -
TypeFighter
A research language with structural types and inference-first design.
SchlenkR/TypeFighter ↗ -
PXL Clock
A 24×24 programmable LED display shipping via Cumin & Potato GmbH. Real hardware, real firmware, real customers.
pxlclock.com ↗ -
BobKonf 2024
Computation Expressions in F# — full tutorial track.
bobkonf.de ↗ -
Community
Recurring features in F# Weekly (Sergey Tihon, Microsoft MVP). Co-host at Amplifying F# with G-Research OSS.
F# Weekly ↗
File · 05 — About
Why me for this problem.
Ronald Schlenker. Fifteen years in .NET. Creator of FsHttp, TypeFighter, and several OSS libraries the F# community uses. Recognized F# Expert (F# Foundation, 2019). Co-founder of the PXL Clock — a programmable hardware product that is itself a working example of pragmatic engineering: small team, in-house discipline, shipped without a framework textbook.
Why this page is written the way it is: every time I see a dying software project, it died the same way — buzzword compliance replacing engineering judgement. The consulting I sell is the opposite of that.