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, …
In Pokémon Go last summer, a new feature popped up: bad guys. Some Pokéstops turned dark, and Team Rocket appears there, and they want to fight me. And they always win, dammit! This much I can discover within the game. If I want to know more — like how to win the fights — I …
Scientists should be on tap but not on top. Winston Churchill In the Cold War, political and technical considerations were no longer separable. The President got a Science Advisory Committee, but “apparently… scientists must not concern themselves with devising and proposing policies; they ought to limit themselves to answering such technical questions as they may …
Then Back in the 2000s, we wrote applications in layers. Presentation layer, client, data transfer, API, business logic, data access, database. We maintained strict separation bet ween these layers, even though every new feature changed all of them. Teams organized around these layers. Front end, back end, DBAs. Layers crisscrossed the flow of data. Responsibility …
It is 7:09. One child is out, and I have returned to bed. Alexa will wake me at 7:15. Six minutes: I could make my bed or do tiny morning yoga. Six minutes of rest is useless; I’ll feel worse afterward. What am I likely to do? I picture the probability space in front of …
Today I typed psql to start a database session. That put me in the wrong place, so I typed \connect org_viz to get into the database I wanted. But then I stopped myself, quit psql, and typed psql -d org_viz at the command prompt. Why? It smooths my work. I knew I would exit and …
Always consider your design a subsystem. Jabe Bloom When we build software, we aren’t building it in nowhere. We aren’t building a closed system that doesn’t interact with its environment. We aren’t building it for our own computer (unless we are; personal automation is fun). We are building it for a purpose. Chances are, we …
Today in a keynote at Spring One, Tom Gianos from Netflix talked about their internal data platform. He listed several components, ending with quick mention of the “Insights Services” team, which studies how the platform is used inside Netflix. A team of people that learns about how internal teams use an internal platform to learn …
The other day we had problems with a service dying. It ran out of memory, crashing and failing to respond to all open requests. That service was running analyses of repositories, digging through their files to report on the condition of the code. It ran out of memory trying to analyze a particular large repository …
In business, we want to focus on our core domain, and let everything else be “good enough.” We need accounting, payroll, travel. But we don’t need those to be special if our core business is software for hospitals. As developers, we want to focus on changing our software, because that is our core work. We …