Reading The Soul of a New Machine,  Kidder 1981. Describing work on the Data General MV/8000 in 1979. Alsing [lead architect] thought that even under the best circumstances, several kinds of fear attend a debugging. One was the fear of “The Big Mistake”, the one that would be discovered late in the game and would require a major redesign–and with it perhaps a fatal delay. There was “the flakey...

Using time words Projects wander. Customers have unreasonable expectations. We make promises we can’t keep and that our customers misinterpret. Yet a simple grammar hack may help curb all of this. Consider the difference in clarity between these two versions of a project’s “next steps” we might send to a customer: “The project would cost $X,XXX and take about two weeks. We’ll also need your high-res images.” Versus the clearer...

Testing code is one thing, but how do we test our ideas. (I’m not talking about validating ideas with customers as in Lean Startup, but testing an idea against your gut. Is there a way to measure that?) When you’re small, opportunity costs are huge–your best customer is another customer you didn’t meet–so how do you know at a real gut level if you’re making a decision for the...

With so much going on at DevCon–and so many friends to catch up with–it can be tempting to put yourself on auto-pilot for the whole conference, just reacting to what’s around you. You can feel a little aimless that way. And you can miss things. You’ve sacrificed a lot to be here so double-down on that commitment: join the DevCon Meditation Challenge and see what it does for you. Folks who...

Schedules suck. Each time we make a software development schedule, we do so despite two glaring problems: 1. It’s really tough to estimate or forecast any substantial development project. (That’s the long version of “schedules are useless”.) Looking at any large successful software project in hindsight your estimates and schedules appear naive if not ridiculous 2. We also can’t deny that schedules themselves (or is it deadlines?) are a huge...

Doing some  financial planning a few months ago, I was thinking about how to budget for all the stuff we’re trying to get done next year–remodeling on the house, some travel, finishing the van/mobile-office/surf wagon–and I just couldn’t get the numbers to come out right. I had this spreadsheet showing how much we’d have available each quarter but it just wasn’t working. And I was getting pretty stressed out...

I’ve been thinking a lot about schedules lately–software production schedules, deadlines, sprint plans, etc.–and I found this from my PauseOnError session 4 years ago: Below, I’ve proposed 8 “blockers” that, if true, seem to reinforce my skepticism that you can’t really share FileMaker development: that anything bigger than “one developer – one project – start to finish” starts to break down pretty quickly. 1. We have no accurate...

“Q: How do we change the future? A: Change the story people tell themselves about the future they will live in.” “Seen through this lens, effective leadership is made up of of just two core disciplines: Forging plausible, inspiring stories about the future we wish for ourselves, our families, our companies or our communities, and Sharing those stories with people in a way that allows them both to...

“The great secret of System Design is to be able to sense what things can be done easily and elegantly by means of a system and what things are hard–and to stay away from the hard things.” – John Gall, Systemantics (out of print)