Project to Product asks more of our software, and more of us

TL;DR: Projects ask teams do what is asked of them; Products ask teams to invent their work. This requires a different way of seeing the world, and not everyone can do it yet. Software is not an up-front investment that pays off over its use. Software is an ongoing concern, an intricate piece of a …

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10x developer: work->knowledge->work

The most productive developer on a team is usually the one with the most knowledge of the system. Of the code, the business domain, the other software this code interacts with, and the people in the organization who can help. How did they get that knowledge? By working on the system. Weinberg remarks that when …

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One Secret to Quality Software

They ask us for quality. What is “quality”? “Well, free of defects.” (Oh it’s a lot more than that.) What is a “defect”? “Well, when it doesn’t work like we expect it to. Like we agreed it should.” Trust me, you didn’t specify how it works. That’s my job, as a developer. To organize all …

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Run Alloy on Windows in Docker

TL;DR: install docker and X410; docker run jessitron/alloy:5.1 The essential work in software development is forming a model in our heads of the system we want. The code is one expression of this model. The code can’t be stronger than this model. So I want a strong model: consistent, complete enough, and expressive. I decided …

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