Thoughts on Software and Technology
For every hour your team spends at work, you have a choice to make: Do you spend it to add value to the product you are building, or do you spend it to improve your tools and processes that allow you to more rapidly deliver value later? This is one of the most fundamental dynamics... Continue Reading →
In “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy”, Richard Rumelt provides a framework for strategic thinking. I found that the ideas from his book also translate to the design of software systems: The key is to have a good sense of the relative strengths and weaknesses of your current position and to apply coherent design decisions. Analysis... Continue Reading →
Office politics are one of these topics that no one wants to talk about. I’ve met people claiming that in their organization, politics do not exist. Others lament that politics are the root of all evil in their workplace. I think that politics are maybe sometimes unpleasant, especially when they negatively impact your work, but... Continue Reading →
I have noticed a fairly anecdotal negative correlation between the effectiveness of the interactions between a product manager and the engineering team and the frequency with which either party uses the phrase “gathering requirements”. As I am generally curious about how language determines our understanding of the process of software development, I would like to... Continue Reading →
I have talked about how software architecture design is a way of constraining the solution space for a project. Here is another angle on this: Any attempt to design a software architecture is an exercise in predicting the future. The usual way to make predictions is to extrapolate data from the past. This is based... Continue Reading →
I have hard people in big technology companies pitch their workplace as being “like a startup”. To me this always seemed like a strange pitch, your big company likely cannot offer the most positive aspects of a startup environment. It might have some of the negative ones, though, which is not a great selling point.... Continue Reading →
Automated tests are strange creatures, they are code that validates code, written by fallible beings. The messier the system under test, the messier the code required to test it. I have grown increasingly fond of property-based testing as a better technique of automated verification of software and in the following paragraphs I am going to... Continue Reading →
A cliche of technology projects is the presence of an overly negative senior engineer who will not hesitate to communicate their disapproval, often accompanied by an extremely negative opinion on the realisability of a given project. I have seen managers finding it difficult to deal with such a situation. In this article, I want to... Continue Reading →
The fact that individuals that are considered high status in an organization often spend a frightening amount of time in meetings has apparently caused some people to draw the opposite conclusion: In some circles, having a lot of meetings seems to have become a status symbol, a sign that one’s input is valued. This observation... Continue Reading →
Those who are on the quest for wisdom and enlightenment about business life have an enormous array of best-selling books to pick from. Even better, you need to look no further than your LinkedIn timeline, a place full of advice on leadership, management, and decision making. The only catch: Nobody seems to care if these... Continue Reading →
The Solution Space 