Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce: the power of choices, of market segmentation.
Two on folded paper: pictures by Simon Schubert (via @KathySierra) and a TED talk by Robert Lang on the origami that modern math and computers allow us to produce.
An abandoned island city. (Via @japanesepod101.) Or, if you want a whole blog about [...]
One of my goals in going to GDC was to get a feel for what the industry is like on the inside. I think I succeeded in that, to some extent; what I wasn’t expecting, however, what that I’d learn so much about what I like about my current job, and about things to [...]
On Tuesday morning of AYE, I attended Esther Derby’s session on organizational change.
This session’s simulation was about a factory that had decided to enter the lucrative “fancy pinwheel” market. She started out by dividing us into four groups (cutters, assemblers, testers, managers), and plunked us down in a room without a lot of information. [...]
Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length…
Visualizing the Python commit history.
Leadership, responsibility, and sausage.
Solving sudoku games via package management.
Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.)
Breakpoints as a checklist.
Programmers, insecurity, source control.
I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that walk along beaches) before; the creator [...]
One aspect of GTD that has surprised me is the weekly review. The idea here is that, once a week, you go over all your projects (and their associated tasks) and all your someday/maybe items, to make sure that your current projects are all on track and that your current projects are what you [...]
I’m trying to hire right now. Which means that I get to read lots of resumes, mediated by various pieces of technology. Which is annoying, among other things because the format in which the resumes are most easily read isn’t necessarily preserved by those mediating technologies.
Specifically, Sun’s internal tools only accept resumes in [...]
Behind Closed Doors recommends that you have frequent one-on-ones with your team members: it says that
One-on-one meetings provide managers an opportunity to ascertain status, solve problems, and provide positive and corrective feedback.
Which I was a bit dubious about: daily standups provide a mechanism for me to get status from my team members every morning and [...]
I’m hiring again. If you live in the S.F. Bay Area, are a good programmer, and want to be the first kid on your block to stream out 320Gbps of video data, please let me know. (You can also submit a resume via the above link.)
I would seem to be more confused than normal these days. Which, in the past, has frequently been a good sign; maybe my brain is figuring something out? Or maybe I’m just clueless. Anyways, I present to you a random collection of thoughts, which may or may not be related to [...]
Deterministic and probabilistic software product management.
Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn.
Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything [...]
Ninja Town. I love the character names.
A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.)
Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. [...]
I’m in the middle of rereading Gerald Weinberg’s Quality Software Management series, which is motivating me to type various quotes on mailing lists that I’m on. Not sure that they’ll do much without the context (actually, I have no reason to believe that they did much for anybody even with the context!), but if [...]
One of the least pleasant aspects of hiring is rejecting candidates. (More actively unpleasant for them than for me, to be sure.) It’s something which, until recently, I did almost exclusively over e-mail.
Sometimes, rejection over e-mail makes sense. I typically put candidates through up to three stages of filters. (Not counting [...]
A bit from Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work (pp. 59–60) that caught my eye:
People sometimes get annoyed when I say job interviews are a weak, often useless, way to select new employees. I’ve had executives, middle managers, engineers, scientists, lawyers, a fire chief, and a minister respond with anecdotes that “prove” how skilled [...]
Last week, I went to a talk by Mike Cohn on “Agile Estimating and Planning”. Good timing: I’d been thinking that I should get around to reading his book on the subject. Which I won a copy of at the drawing after the talk; apparently my recent remarkable good luck has (correctly) decided [...]
Another quote from The Toyota Product Development System (p. 102), in the section on checklists:
A company that cannot standardize will struggle to learn from experience and is not truly engaged in lean thinking. Indeed, any company that simply tries new things without standardizing along the way is “randomly wandering through a maze,” repeating [...]
A quote from Morgan and Liker’s The Toyota Product Development System:
Toyota does very little “information broadcasting” to the masses. Instead, it is up to the individual engineer to know what he or she is responsible for, to pull what is needed, and to know where to get it.
Here’s the full context (pp. 95-96; [...]
Sorry for the lack of posts. I might have a post stuck in me, or I might just be getting lazy, or might not be thinking enough; hard to say. Maybe I’ll get unstuck over the holidays. Anyways, I present another banal application of lean to everyday life:
Using my mad queue-management skillz, [...]
One thing that’s been bothering me at work recently: our response time to bugs is absurdly slow. Even bugs that are marked as high priority take a while to get worked on; bugs that aren’t marked as high priority may well never get worked on.
Now, some of this is a classification issue: maybe a [...]
I just finished Lean Thinking; it’s my current favorite lean book. One thing that made me jealous: they give several (to me) convincing examples of companies wanting to try out lean, and that brought in some people who really knew how lean worked. After doing what those people said, they immediately got some [...]
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