Where the light is better
A woman comes across a man crawling under a street lamp. “I’ve lost my car keys,” he explains. The woman tries to help the man find his keys. After a few minutes of searching, she asks “Where exactly did you drop them?” “Down the street, next to my car.” Puzzled, she asks “Then why aren’t you looking over there?” “The light is better here.” People often look where it seems easiest or most convenient to look, rather than in a more difficult, but more correct place.
Less Wasting Time
The sub-theme this week is on trying to find ways to improve developer happiness and to reduce unpleasant time wasters. Rafe Colburn in Don’t order your team to work more hours talks about bosses who ask staff to work more hours: Every time you’re tempted to do so, sit down with members of the team and ask them how many hours a week they spend dealing with stuff not related to shipping and work to make those things go away instead.
Trade Trade Secrets
A brilliant essay by Danielle Fong called Trade Trade Secrets, very worth a read, covers everything from Intellectual Property, to explaining the differences between theft, transcription, transformation and inspiration, to how the law stifles all four of them. The great danger of laws that ignore these is not that they will prevent theft, but that they will so heavyhandedly prevent transformation and inspiration: the engines of our entire civilization. Just read it.
Understanding ACTA
Lets see if I understand ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: THEM: It’s purpose is to create a legal standard for global intellectual property rights enforcement. US: Sounds good, it’s all so confusing, consistency may be nice. THEM: The WTO already has 153 countries signed up to TRIPS which is a legal standard for global intellectual property rights enforcement, ACTA overrides it. US: Mmmbokaaay, do we need a new deal then?
Operations by Exception
If we define operations as “a piece of organized and concerted activity involving a number of people”, then all businesses consist of a lot of operations. Back offices, accounting groups, processing units, operations departments, call them what you may, there are departments and departments of operations. In the Automate or Die Hiltmonism, I pointed out the need to automate as much of your process flow as you can. This means tackling operations, its hordes of people, its arcane processes, its political hierarchy and its bureaucratic inertia.
Bread crumbs in Day One
I switched over to Day One for journaling at the start of the year on a lark, and its become a core part of my process. Here are three things I do with it: 1. Bread crumb blog posts I have updated the Octopress rake file for new_post to also bread crumb the new post in Day One (and launch Byword for editing). Place this at the end of the :new_post task (see below for details on the LogToDayOne.
Developers, A Love Story
By @macdrifter, Developers, A Love Story. While browsing my Application folder on my Mac, I noticed something. I have a fondness for some apps that I rarely use. I’m just glad that I own them. I may not use them all but I feel good about the money I’ve spent. I second the motion.
A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
A classic by James Hague entitled A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering. Writing a spellchecker in the mid-1980s was a hard problem. Programmers came up with some impressive data compression methods in response to the spellchecker challenge. Likewise there were some very clever data structures for quickly finding words in a compressed dictionary. This was a problem that could take months of focused effort to work out a solution to.
Make a better product
Rich Siegel, of BBEdit fame, in his blog article Bar Sopa, makes the right point on piracy: A good way to do this is to make a product for which more people want to pay a fair price than who are willing to steal it. and Take the money you would have spent on fighting piracy and use it to make a better product and/or service. Making more laws is not the answer.
Software is Eating the World
Marc Andreessen, writing in the WSJ Why Software Is Eating The World, writes: More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. The best evidence of Software eating the world, one that I think he missed, is that the Phone component on an iPhone or Android device is an app, just another piece of software!