Rework is ok. Refactoring is ok. BDUF (Big Design Up Front) is bad. Minimal amount to get to market is good. Getting to market is good. Don’t get into analysis paralysis.
Best book that cleanly cuts to the chase I’ve read in a long while: Rework
…and a few friendly reminder videos.
I really can’t emphasize how much better an individual or a company is at getting things done, getting things to market, and generally improving what they do in life when taking a lot of the advice in this book to heart. Read it. Know it, and kill the things that are dragging you and your company down.
Thanks. This has been a friendly public service announcement by yours truly. Adron B. Hall here at Composite Code Blog. 😀 Cheers!
I’ve been catching up on blogs lately & reading a few books, the technical type, as one might imagine. To collect my thoughts I decided to have a sit down and write up a little bit on each of the entries & books I’ve found notable. Here’s the recap.
When I read this, I almost lost my temper before I even got to reading the blog entry. But I did and it turned out a good read. Phil & team are trying out some new approaches for the NuGet Project to see if they can increase quality & efficiencies of the product and project. You’ll have to give it a read to see how much he really hates Lean. 😉
Bobby is doing these visits in the spirit of Corey Haines Journeyman Tours. I’ve got a ton of respect for anyone that can coordinate time & effort to do this. The amount of learning, open mindedness, and other characteristics are high on my list of awesome. Cheers to your visit to Getty Bobby, it was good reading about your experience. I must say, one of my favorite bits is the picture you got of the technical debt kanban. Absolutely great idea!
Anyway that is all I’ve got for now. Will probably do another wrap up sometime later in the week. Until then, cheers!
I recently did a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit. It had been a really long time since I listed the current tools, SDKs, and frameworks that I’ve been using. Thus here’s my entourage of software that I use on a regular basis that is installed on my primary development machines.
In addition to these packages of software another as important, if not more important to my day-to-day software development includes these software services and cloud hosting services.
That video alone pretty much says it all. It isn’t about the word processor, or the device, it’s just about writing what you want when you want and how you want. The old legacy mindset of an installed word processor is a bit feeble these days. Especially considering the integrity of Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word. Don’t even get me started on how flimsy Excel is. The old installed application sweet of several hundred Megabytes just doesn’t hold up for an fast paced, quickly adaptive, thought leader style business. Microsoft said it best in the old wars between WordPerfect and Word, even though WordPerfect (which I think version 9 or 11 or something is STILL more feature rich than Word) had tons of more features, Microsoft stated frequently that 80-90% of users never used those features.
Now we’re in a situation were 80-90% of people don’t use the features in Word, and it costs a lot of cash versus the free offering from Google Docs. Funny how the tides turn to throw Microsoft’s won words back at the company.
Some may be screaming at this point, “nobody is going to dump Word & the Office Suite”. Again, the same thing was said about WordPerfect in the late 90’s. Does anyone still use it? Maybe 1-2% of the market?
Other people may also argue, “but all of the programmable extensible… [fill in some form of extending Office here] …stuff for Office makes it immensely valuable!” Maybe, but it is a small subset of users that actually use addons to their Microsoft Office Suite. In addition, most developers don’t want to touch Office addons at all, they’d rather the suite languish than to develop to the jumbled chaos that is the Microsoft Office Suite Addons and such.
But I digress, one might say, “you’re just biased and don’t like the Microsoft Office Suite”… and I’d say you got me there! I’m guilty. Over the years Microsoft has made billions of dollars on this suite. By proxy they’ve then dumped billions of dollars into software development and other things. However, people really shouldn’t be spending vast sums of money on something that should – and will – become a commodity software product over the next 1-5 years. As Enterprises realize they can easily provide word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software for small percentages of what Microsoft does the transitions should continue to occur.
Microsoft even seems convinced of this and started making the move with Office 365 + SaaS based Office provision on Windows Live. I don’t wish the company ill will of any sort, so hopefully they’ll pull out of their software nose dive with the SaaS offering.
Yesterday I wrote a somewhat critical blog entry to Microsoft regarding their completely unintelligible use of domains, subdomains, and messaging around products. I’m not sure who exactly is responsible, but I hope they read it. I didn’t mean it as a personal attack or anything, just simply as a “please get yourself in line and respect what you do” type of message.
So that leads me to this open letter. This open letter is primarily about giving props for a job well done on the site redesign of MSDN. First off though I want to mention one thing.
Tip #1 – The URL is still a bit funky with the .aspx and en-us in it. Clean that thing up. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx should look more like http://msdn.microsoft.com/ and that’s it. NOTHING else. At least get rid of the “default.aspx” page hanging around there. Almost every major framework stack; PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc has removed the index.htm and at least left clean RESTful URIs. It is a beautiful thing, make yours beautiful too.
Ok, now for the props!
Dear MSDN Team,
I wanted to write this open letter and commend the team on the redesign of the MSDN Site. First let’s take a look at the MSDN Site.
The other point I’d like to draw attention to is that someone put the news on the upper part of the page. Here I caught the “Visual Studio Lightswitch” News bit. Of course, one could say it’s just a big add, but it really is more about MSDN news bits. But I digress, I like that the upper section has that instead of digging around for it.
The sections below that have various links, that often don’t show up on the initial page display. Scrolling down to search through this information is acceptable though, as it is something one would dig through and have intent around something very specific.
desktop
desktop
The desktop section of the site is setup following the new guidelines around simplification of data presentation. This is something that has been sorely needed on MSDN for years. Not sure if one remembers the nasty nested to the Nth degree treeview on the left hand side. I don’t know where it went, but I’m really happy it is gone. Now the layout is simple and to the point, with the key points of information being laid out in multiple steps.
web
The web section, again follows this new redesign model of user experience.
web
cloud
The cloud section again follows this new redesign…
cloud
phone
This too follows the redesign. Simple, clean, and straight forward presentation of information.
phone
I also like how the messaging around the primary platforms is clear. It almost doesn’t’ seem like marketing is involved, which in my opinion is the best type of marketing. When marketing kind of acts as the librarian that is helping you to find that key piece of information. It’s very cool, it’s almost kind of cool in a way.
To summarize, I’m impressed. MSDN Team, you guys have done a great job. Props!
A Frequent Business User and Customer,
Adron @ Composite Code
That’s it for open letters for a while. Now I’m off to do a bit of coding with Azure for the Phone using Visual Studio 2010. 🙂
You must be logged in to post a comment.