Years ago I worked on a software project for specialist users. They hated it. Absolutely despised this application. When I finally got the chance to visit the dev team in Long Beach, what I discovered what that almost none of them had ever actually used the software they were building. Some had never even seen […]
I wanted to follow up on my last blog post. Now I am aware that someone can read that post and just tear it to shreds. The assumption is that the electrician is working towards an experience-based and intuition-driven understanding of the outcome. But technology marches forward, and we have to question whether the electrician […]
I love analogies. Here’s another one! Let’s say you have a house, an older house: 30, 40, maybe even 50 years old. And it’s having electrical problems; lights flicker, outlets don’t all seem grounded, switches don’t all work. If you brought in a highly experienced and skilled electrician, that person could probably, within about 45 […]
So I have something I call the “Pragmatic Overlay”. Its the concept that you can have an idealized vision or plan for whatever you are wanting to do. But, and this usually only comes based on experience, you have to have an element of pragmatism to it. Some simple examples are “I want to go […]
I was talking to my wife about work, which I realize sounds incredibly boring but we find it interesting. Anyways, my wife is a partner in an accounting firm and she has been signing up a lot of new clients lately. We were talking about expectation management with clients, and how there’s an aspect of […]
In the past I’ve talked about emergent requirements. You know those…those are the ones where you’re chugging along, building your system, you’re pretty far along, and then you have a meeting with the customer or product owner and they say something and you realize, “Wait a moment, they think the system should do X!” And […]
I wanted to post a follow-up to last week’s post. I really like looking through the lens of “We could theoretically finish eventually, but do we have enough time and money to get there?”, which is really just a practical implementation of the “iron triangle” (fast, cheap, good, pick two). But there’s another nuance here […]
So if you’ve ever worked with me, or you’ve read enough of this blog, you’ve no doubt seen that I base many of my ideas on quotes and memes. Well, here’s a new one that I’ve started using a lot lately. “Given enough constraints, the solution space goes to zero.” What does this mean? Let’s […]
Last week I talked about the importance of domain knowledge. I asserted that if you are building, supporting, or selling something, that it was important to understand the domain that you were working in. Otherwise, you would face challenges. But that’s the ideal use case. What about the pragmatic reality of the situation, where this […]
For quite a while, I was excited about the new videogame Cyberpunk 2077 being released. It looked to be quite an amazing game. When it was released, although it had many great aspects the game also had a lot of bugs and defects. One bug, in particular, made the rounds on social media, as video capture. It […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 