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Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. Corollary: It always takes more repetitions to tell people what you’re doing, how you’re going to do it, why you’re doing it, how much progress you’ve made, that you finished doing it, etc. even when you take into… Continue reading The project management corollary to Hofstadter’s Law

The JavaScript ecosystem’s gone to a strange place where dense frameworks and complex tooling are the status quo. But, there are data-points suggesting the pendulum could swing back sooner than later: Snowpack 2.0 – download all your deps, import them as modules. Snappy development experience ensues. lit-html – generate DOM without going through React/Vue/etc. intricacies… Continue reading Towards smaller JavaScript

The gestalt of what’s new in software and how it’s changing our world has evolved over the decades. In the ‘90s, it was “don’t make me think!”. User interfaces went from text-based systems that required memorization and expertise to graphical systems that afforded more casual use of computers. Unix users and their terminals are a… Continue reading The possibility of software through the ages

The Revenge of the Intuitive – Brian Eno lamented the downsides of a modern, computer-based recording console. Twenty years ago! The trade-offs for “freedom” at the expense of human affordances were too much for Eno at the time. Feels like we’re in a similar spot with developer tooling. It works for the most accomplished and persistent… Continue reading The Revenge of the Intuitive and developer tools in 2020

I rented a 12-year old Porsche Boxster via Turo this weekend. Good app, great car. I’m shopping older German convertibles for my next car. Paying a little to rent a prospective car for a day is way better than driving one for less than an hour. Plus, no sales tactics! The center of the Boxster… Continue reading One strong center and two senses stimulated

Features in software are answers to questions. How can customers send what they’re looking at to someone else? That’s share via email. How can customers distill all the data about my project’s tasks down to raw data to analyze it? That’s a report, probably with a CSV export. All of these answers exist on some… Continue reading Manage for time and mental burden

In the sense that trees of people (managers and reports, ala Taylorism) are the old guard. Data (folders and files) are old sauce and nodes + edges are new sauce. In the sense that part of the confusion of our modern world is that e.g. the Koch brothers have considerable influence on how the Republican… Continue reading Graphs are the new hierarchies

A lot of us are out here, amongst all the strangeness of the world, trying to figure out how to help our teams adjust to collaborating remotely. It’s long been my observation that nothing beats people in a room together communicating via ad-hoc scribbles on a whiteboard. Seems like a good time to survey the… Continue reading Whiteboard, even if you’re a distributed team

Remember secretaries and drinking at work? And land-line telephones? And smoking inside? Blech! And an even more unequal society with even more thumbs on the scales? My wife and I, when we first watched Mad Men: Oy, Makefiles! And weird preprocessor tricks! And file-scoped variables/memory ownership? And everything is an int, sometimes pretending to be… Continue reading Wherein the “good old days” are revisited