Tag: design

Micromanagement

“Micromanagement is symptomatic of a lack of trust. The remedy for this ailment is to hire experts and then trust their judgment. In a startup, you can drastically reduce momentum by applying micromanagement, or you can boost momentum by giving trust. It’s pretty amazing what can happen when a group of talented people who trust each other get together and decide to make something awesome.”
Tom Preston, Github lessons learned 2008

Steve Yegge on the benefit of Platforms

Steve Yegge accidentally shared this memo externally on Google+ but has since taken it down, which is the only mistake he made. I’m resharing it here because my mobile safari browser had problems on the page, and I needed to keep a “fork” of it for future reference. Hands down this is the most enlightening post I’ve read on Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and programmable functional units.

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A single product champion is capable of only so much crazy

Product Engineering, Messier in Practice

  1. Got a brilliant concept which early feedback reveals as a huge market opportunity? [check]
  2. Have the sharpest minds and the most adept hands in the industry ready to execute a polished design and beta? [check]
  3. Turn the crank and toil away to a product success story right? [keep dreaming]
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Edge Cases


For interactive web apps and APIs exhaustive testing comes from a combination of internal regressions and heavy external usage. The larger the client base, the further the potential code coverage exceeds any potential internal tests. Roll out strategies ease into releases by slowly propagating changes throughout the network of clients, until stable confidence is achieved.

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How to create an interactive gallery for your blog with jquery and the fancybox plugin

Yesterday I was inspired to create a short montage of ocean and beach related photos to accompany a SoundCloud recording I made while strolling the shore. The built in WordPress gallery is fairly limited, but in May I discovered the cycle jquery plugin for a photo sharing post. While the on page script worked at the time, it has since run into issues so I've been looking for an alternative. I found a nifty interactive image browser called Fancybox a few weeks back, and this post describes how you can incorporate it's functionality into your own blog or site. (more...)

Crazy East Coast Weather, Wild Work Tale of Two Sims Part Duo

Bizarro World Weather

Last week I got a chance to go on a solid 21 mile walk that started with 100 degrees of humid heat, and ended with an abysmal thunderstorm and torrential down pour (kinda fun). This morning it’s 55F and chilly. I do believe it’s likely good ole mother nature forgot what the transition from summer to spring is supposed to be like. Gotta marvel at her unpredictability.

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