unclebobmartin (@unclebobmartin):IRS agents, Security Burocrats, and bad software people should go on the first ship.Don't worry, we'll be right behind on the second ship.
— Uncle Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin) April 5, 2010
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It’s really funny, honestly, but kids, Java isn’t cool. It hasn’t been cool for a long time.
Slashdot even posted “The Struggle to Keep Java Relevant,” which … wow. Not only is Java not cool, but it’s not even relevant any more. Now, that article is … odd, because “relevant” apparently means “used by people with piercings,” which is an odd metric, but still!
My suggestion to the team was that they put their creation story on the landing page. If I could read about the moment they had their cool idea, they would have given me two valuable gifts–the emotional energy to keep working at understanding their idea and the beginnings of an intellectual understanding as well.
The essence of sketching is selectivity. With forward sketching you rough out some issues in code you are about to write, usually discussing them with a group of people with your team. Your aim is to use the sketches to help communicate ideas and alternatives about what you're about to do. You don't talk about all the code you are going to work on, just important issues that you want to run past your colleagues first, or sections of the design that you want to visualize before you begin programming.
In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.
secretGeek (@secretGeek):A design is complete not when there is nothing more to add but rather when the client's wallet has nothing left to remove.
— Leon Bambrick (@secretGeek) March 30, 2010
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Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.”
A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.”
"Here we had 50, 60, 70 people around the world collaborating around this one idea that rolled directly to Bill Gates. Every two weeks there was a report that went to him. He was very interested in this, at the time it was the largest advertising campaign, sort of dollar push they ever put behind something. I think it was about $120 million or something and we were managing it all via email in this ridiculous capacity and I asked them. I looked at them all and said, why aren't we using something like Sharepoint to manage this, in a workspace to manage the project. And they all looked at me. And they laughed at me. And they said, Come on! We don't have the resources to do that! And at that point everything just clicked... We realized, if Microsoft who has infinite cash, that makes pretty damn good collaboration software... Sharepoint's a good tool if you have all the resources in the world to do it! If they couldn't do it, then how in the world is a small or medium size business going to be able to do something like that?!?!"
When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.
These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.
"It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search. Small pieces of the problem have been attacked; in the future we will solve this hard problem in general, instead of being satisfied with windfalls and the lowest-hanging fruit on the technology tree."
