Waste, fast and slow
When you spot a distasteful waste, ask: does this waste speed me up, or does this waste slows me down forever?
Open your eyes to the nonsense
Logic and culture have nothing to do with one another. Jerry Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting A friend of mine works for a large government organization that runs a dam, extracting electricity from water and gravity. They have internal software development, of course, and my friend described some impressive obstacles to change. Deploying a new …
A Christmas Adventure
Here’s our D&D campaign for the day, invented by Tyler. DMs only — Run this for your group: All the adventurers are running around the city of Frostfang celebrating Candlenights. A person is a suit runs out of the Hot Bubbly Rum factory “Are you adventurers? I’m being haunted! I need protection!” He offers you …
Smarter dishwasher, smarter cook
Today before breakfast, we started the dishwasher. I think they might have been clean already, but when I saw Avdi loading all the dirty cups from the counters in, I didn’t complain. Today making scrambled eggs, I didn’t have my favorite spatula. It was in the dishwasher. Dang it! This is a danger of running …
How can we develop and operate increasingly useful software?
Most software gets harder to change as it ages. Making modern applications, it is not enough to write a system and put it out there. We need continual improvement and adaptation to the growing world. How can we develop and operate increasingly useful software? To answer this, I need a mental model of how software …
Read moreHow can we develop and operate increasingly useful software?
Do things right in VSCode
Here are some settings that I change when I install VS Code on a new computer. Change these by searching for them in the settings UI (Ctrl-comma on Windows or ⌘-, on Mac). Or open the JSON and paste them in; access the JSON from the command palette (Ctrl-Shift-P) by searching for Preferences: Open Settings …
Basements and galleries
In a big new project, where do you start? My dad bought this old building, and he’s turning it into an antique mall. It’s a huge project: two floors of shopping plus a gallery and museum at the top. Yesterday he showed me what he’s done so far. In the basement, he added support beams …
Rebase on the World: personal shell choice
“Why use bash when you have PowerShell?” <– words I did not expect to hear from my own mouth. Over the past few weeks I’ve begun learning PowerShell, and it’s an improvement over the UNIX (and family) shells, bash and ksh etc. PowerShell is newer. It builds on what those shells did right, and then …
Increase capacity, move slower
If the highways are crowded, and they build more lanes, the highways get more crowded. If development is slow, and you add resources, development gets slower. Adding people to a project increases the capacity for activity. Activity doesn’t translate to outcomes. In these cases, you’re adding capacity to the system for cars, or for work, …
Talk: TypeScript for Enterprise Developers
Jessica Kerr talks about some of the great things in TypeScript, like the flexible type systems and the possibility to test before compilation, but also things that make TypeScript painful. She shows how Node and npm work differently from the JVM (or CLR), and some of the surprises she hit learning this language. Watch it …