Aug 16, 2007
“..if we’re always going to revisit the (X)HTML at redesign time, use of visual class names doesn’t negatively impact our work.
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Aug 15, 2007
The inverted pyramid for getting to 1.0
Pitch, people, process, product.
“A sure sign of a healthy pyramid is that one layer invades another. Think of each change to people, process, and pitch as a shove in one direction. This movement requires compensation in the other layers otherwise the whole thing falls over. If, in your organization, your pyramid is not constantly adjusting to keep itself upright, Something’s wrong. If the new folks aren’t testing the pitch, they either don’t buy it or they don’t get it. If your engineers aren’t arguing about the way they develop software ALL THE TIME, they’re becoming stagnant and that trickles down to your pitch and trickles up to your product.”Michael Lopp
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Aug 15, 2007
“When your third engineer starts tracking bugs on that huge whiteboard in the meeting room, that’s process. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t even have to be universally agreed upon on, it just has to be stuck in a place where every can see it.
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Aug 15, 2007
“Of course “requirements” doesn’t mean requirements, we should all know that by now. “Requirements” are more like wishes, or more correctly, some placeholder for what I need, or still more correctly, “some placeholder for what I think solves what I think is the phrasing for a problem or desire I think I have.” So a person or group of people write down a bunch of these wish / placeholder things. And of course you’re a fool if you believe them all.
— Alistair Cockburn echoes Captain Barbossa
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Aug 15, 2007
“As humankind moves along, shedding light in the direction of the movement, Darkness repossesses the area behind us.
— Dad
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Aug 15, 2007
A roadmap for getting luck on your side
Develop energy, skills of synthesis and pattern recognition, and a unique, comfortable, eclectic lifestyle.
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Aug 15, 2007
“Bizarrely, each time we have won in England there was no coach.
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Aug 14, 2007
“We’ve come to learn that it’s hard to motivate technical people, including ourselves, through money, colorful toys, or gigantic monitors. We try, instead, to have a mock-up ready for everything we’re about to approach so the motivation for accomplishment is instilled by our need to see something that looks cool come alive.
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Aug 14, 2007
“The hegemony of “free” will in the long run end up narrowing our choices rather than expanding them. I still hope that there will be a way to actually sell stuff on the internet rather than having to give everything away for free, crassly plastered with ads.
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Aug 14, 2007
“Awareness of human fallibility is dangerous knowledge, if you remind yourself of the fallibility of those who disagree with you. If I am selective about which arguments I inspect for errors, or even how hard I inspect for errors, then every new rule of rationality I learn, every new logical flaw I know how to detect, makes me that much stupider.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky.pdf via
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