fighting the lack of good ideas
Back in 2009, Joel Spolsky wrote an article called The Duct Tape Programmer. Of everything he has written, I think this is the very pinnacle, and it is summed in one simple sentence in the middle: “Shipping is a feature.” I’ve referenced this article twice before (in Feb and Sep of ’11). Why is this…
continue “delivering solutions – “shipping is a feature!”” »
Recently came across a seriously funky issue with one of HP’s products (don’t laugh – I know there’s loads of funkiness in HP tools). HP Cloud Service Automation (3.1) allows you to schedule requests in the future. It also allows you schedule end dates for subscriptions. That’s neat. Here’s the problem: if you delete a…
continue “don’t implement your scheduler in a pure queue design” »
At the beginning of 2008 I interviewed with a little outfit* in Annapolis to become their head of support. (This was just a month after interviewing with FogCreek.) Oddly enough that day, one of my former colleagues at Opsware who had moved-on was my tech screener. Needless to say, that aspect of the interview I…
I learned about the call command in Windows recently. Some context – was trying to run a command via HPSA at a customer, but kept getting an error that the program was not a recognized internal or external command. Very frustrating. Then one of the guys I worked with suggested adding a “call” to the…
Knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have written about various aspects of it before. The most vital commodity any organization has is the knowledge of its members – it does not matter if it is a historical society, company, church, or school: the organizational knowledge…
continue “organizational knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination” »
Shortcuts. Shortcuts are great. But only when you know the long way. Without hard work, the short cut will seem hard. Passive income seems to fall into this category. Some people think panhandling is a form of passive income. It’s not. The panhandler works for his money – he talks to people, shakes a cup, whatever: he…
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” You’ve probably been asked that questions hundreds of times in your life – parents, friends, teachers, yourself, movies. It’s a common theme. For most of us, the decision gets made sometime in our late teens or during college: doctor, mom, lawyer, electrician, plumber, teacher, policeman,…