Here’s a real dinger of a sentence from Michael Lopp’s latest, The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well: Failure is created by the increasing entropy of a growing number of humans running around the building, good intentions in hand, breaking things. Growing an organization requires rethinking trust, coordination, and collaboration. The breakpoints where things… Continue reading Failure = entropy due to adding humans
Writing is thinking, so write about code
Writing clarifies thinking. Therefore, writing design docs clarifies one’s thinking about code. Design Docs at Google and an example/meta design doc from the same author are great places to start! I found that writing prose until I run out of clarity and then switching to proof-of-concept code is even better. The constraint of making an… Continue reading Writing is thinking, so write about code
Bradford Fults on feedback and human bias
A Better Approach to 360° Feedback: Bradford Fults shares ways to route around fallible human memory and gather useful information when it comes to review season. Humans also have a recency bias and suffer from long-term memory distortions that change to fit their current opinions of other people. This means that âobservationsâ from months ago… Continue reading Bradford Fults on feedback and human bias
The project management corollary to Hofstadter’s Law
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
Towards smaller JavaScript
The JavaScript ecosystemâs 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 possibility of software through the ages
The gestalt of what’s new in software and how it’s changing our world has evolved over the decades. In the â90s, it was âdonât make me think!â. 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 and developer tools in 2020
The Revenge of the Intuitive – Brian Eno lamented the downsides of a modern, computer-based recording console. Twenty years ago! The trade-offs for âfreedomâ at the expense of human affordances were too much for Eno at the time. Feels like weâre 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
One strong center and two senses stimulated
I rented a 12-year old Porsche Boxster via Turo this weekend. Good app, great car. Iâm 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
Manage for time and mental burden
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
Graphs are the new hierarchies
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
