Al Hilāliyya Perpeetum Mobile When I was in 5th grade, at the end of the academic year, just before the start of the summer vacation, our Physics teacher shared with us a “big secret”: he invented a “perpetuum mobile” machine. He went on a rant about how he has it all designed, could not build it because he did […]
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A word I constantly hear these days is “focus”. It comes in many forms, from advisors insisting the company should focus on this or that aspect of the business, from experts that have focused their career on a narrow field, to behavioral experts explaining that multitasking is “killing our brains” and we should focus on […]
In one of my early jobs, I was a young engineer working for a company assembling electricity meters. Several thousand employees were working day and night putting those together, and the main activity was using small screwdrivers to screw together the many parts of the device. A key productivity tool was the electrical screwdriver – […]
Many years ago, I was working for a large Canadian bank, managing two very different development teams — one using C++ to build a derivatives trading system, and one of Cobol programmers maintaining the bank General Ledger application. While the culture clash was obvious to any observer, nothing reflected it better than the big poster […]
There are many benefits to an internal beta — a (mostly) forgiving audience, a simple distribution mechanism, easy to get feedback (you got their email address already…), etc. However, if you do not believe in early feedback and incremental development, here is my free advice on what you can say to avoid going through it […]
I see it again and again — some developers are so focused on delivering the software that they forget to get an early prototype out for people to check and provide feedback. It is almost like in one of the classic Dilbert cartoons, where a developer was complaining about “evil-spawned users”… There are a couple […]
One of the senior software developers that I know used to ask me on a regular basis about “the requirements”. He would insist on having a “document” that would tell him what he needs to implement. I would always tell him to talk to users/customers to find out — and he would move to the […]