TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often. Software systems get big, and they have lots of parts, and those parts need to talk to each other. Maybe we’re building …
Just now, Avdi had a miserable experience buying curtains. He went to pick up an order that he placed last night, but Lowe’s didn’t have it. The order was sent to the wrong store and it was a huge pain to figure out. Software is hard to get right. And every time we don’t, customers …
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 …
One way to be a 10x developer is to write the system, so you know more about it that anyone else. I call this person the “purple developer.”
Y’know how sometimes a particular logged-in user isn’t authorized for some option, so you don’t show it to them? Don’t do that to people. Tell me it’s there, tell me I can’t do it, tell me who can. This is what happens when you hide it: Dave and I exist in different worlds, and we …
I wanted it to be turtles all the way down. (where turtles are objects, or functions)
But it isn’t…
In any large enough company, there are front-line workers, management, and executives. Executives set direction, management sets up the situation for the workers, and workers do the labor. Workers do the company business every day, providing capabilities to external or internal customers. Management gets them the tools and training they need, for today and for …
Code is like a coastline: the closer you look, the farther from here to there. Can we diminish this effect?
Standardization turns a craft into a knowledge-based industry, says Tiago Forte. Has that happened to software, with open-source libraries as standards?
“Plants are movers…. Plants grow to where they’re going.” Frazier, P. & Jamone, Lorenzo & Althoefer, Kaspar & Calvo, Paco. (2020). Plant Bioinspired Ecological Robotics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 7. 10.3389/frobt.2020.00079. This is a keynote written originally for a private company. I’ll do it at conferences, including YOW! in September 2020. Short bite: In …