“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
Tag: design
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.
The Plot of Every Story
My blogging has quieted over my recent time off, but I thought this video was a precious share of Kurt Vonnegut discussion the plot of every story.
A single product champion is capable of only so much crazy
Product Engineering, Messier in Practice
- Got a brilliant concept which early feedback reveals as a huge market opportunity? [check]
- Have the sharpest minds and the most adept hands in the industry ready to execute a polished design and beta? [check]
- Turn the crank and toil away to a product success story right? [keep dreaming]
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.
How to create an interactive gallery for your blog with jquery and the fancybox plugin
Fluid Schedules are for humans, Iterative Model Driven Development
“The key to project planning is to embrace the obvious fact that people don’t know, what they don’t know.”
When writing engineering software be like Scotty
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.
How to add an instapaper text button to your blog
Have you ever wanted to offer your readers enhanced readability for your stylized blog but weren’t sure how? It’s as easy as a two step process using the Instapaper text or Readability bookmarklets.
