Years ago, something clicked when I read about Anthony Bourdain’s approach to feeding crowds. It was his stunt turkey technique, where he cooks an extra turkey the week before the actual event. It made me think about how we release software. It seemed absurd at first: why would you cook two turkeys for one dinner? Then I realized what he was really doing: load balancing across time. ...
Remember autoconf? If you were building software in the late ’90s or early 2000s, you probably have scars. You’d write some configuration rules, run the tool, and out popped a perfectly functional makefile. It felt like magic, until it didn’t. The moment autoconf broke, you were debugging generated shell scripts that stretched for thousands of lines. The abstraction that seemed so elegant suddenly became opaque hell. You needed to understand not just what you wanted, but how the magic worked, where it could fail, and why. ...
Something weird happened the other day. I found myself sketching more than I had in years. The pages quickly filled with the doodles, wireframes, and half-formed ideas that used to live in my head until they died of neglect. The reason? I can finally get from sketch to fleshed-out concept fast enough that my ideas don’t evaporate. After a few months of serious AI-assisted development, I’m starting to understand what these tools actually do well, and more importantly, where they will cheerfully lead you off a cliff. They don’t replace thinking, they amplify it. But only if you understand the difference between augmenting your expertise and outsourcing your judgment. ...
Some of my most productive business tools are the simplest. Take the triage board. It’s a whiteboard that hangs over my desk that has a list of my current projects, with magnets marking what I’m working on next. Weekly I erase the board and re-prioritize my projects, and daily I scribble notes and move the magnets as I work. These concrete tools are about focus, flexibility, and the least amount of investment possible. It’s critical to work on the most important things, and important to know what’s next. Seeing the list of clients and projects helps me understand where I stand in terms of bandwidth too, using the simple, physical limits of the size of the board and legibility of my writing at smaller sizes. ...
“A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you > can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can > become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. > The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop > looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. > Gulp.” (Jeff Bezos) This is a quote from a Jeff Bezos letter to the board, talking about internal metrics and improvements. Sometimes when you add a process to a problem, the process can become the focus and not the outcome. ...