Let’s play a little with the rule of thumb that every team member you need to communicate with, reduces your Ideal time by some percentage. Let’s assume that all developers in team are equally productive, and everyone can make the same Ideal time per Project day. And first, we start with a team, where every …
Category Archives: tech-and-biz
How to estimate
Just like Merging, estimation is one of those things that benefit from being regularly trained, but resists training because of the strong negative error consequences. Fortunately, there are some common advices that transfer the burden from the intuition to rationality, and therefore it can be learned easier. Read the fucking spec This sounds obvious, but in …
Legacy Code
Engineering and Product have very different concepts about the legacy code. For the developers, there are two kinds of legacy code. The one is called legacy code, and it is everything made by somebody else. Another one is called the existing platform, and it encompasses all the code they have written themselves. The legacy code legacy …
Can everything be broken?
One argument against DRM that pirates often repeat is that “every software out there has been or can be broken”. I hate this argument not only because it is factually wrong, but because most of the time it is being told by people who know nothing about software security, but still they use the same tone as if they …
Not about monads in JavaScript
After having watched the first 5 minutes of video about monads in JavaScript (I normally stop listening when someone says “this helps you to reason about your code”, and they’ve managed to say it that early in talk), I’ve remembered my old hypothesis that the academia and computer scientists in fact not evil mad scientists, …
Apple User Experience, part II
Last year I’ve presented my mother an iPad and shared my mixed experiences with it. It turned out, that most of the time, my mother has used it as a YouTube client: my parents don’t have Russian TV subscription in the cable network, so that she was watching Russian content present on YouTube. This year, I’ve …
Bridging the gap, step one
It is not a secret that there is a gap between engineering and business worlds. They speak different languages, and they are often in conflict. Switching sides and going from engineering to product management, I was looking forward to see the world from business point of view. I was sure that I’ll become a lot …
Anti-Pirate 2
I’ve read a blog post by Olga Gromyko, who is a popular award-winning Russian and Belorussian writer and, one can say, one of the founders of a new genre of Russian literature (the humorous fantasy). And this post has resonated so well with the summary of my previous Anti-Pirate post that I’ve decided to translate it here (shortened and totally …
M$ h8trz
There are three types of Microsoft haters. The first one are those who in every topic would mention how inferior the PC platform and Microsoft products are. The second one are those who are completely ignorant, know nothing about Microsoft technologies, believe they don’t need to know anything about them, and have the attitude living in a world without Microsoft. The third …
Is there life beyond Scrum, part 2
Startup mode development is only possible for very small teams. It is not suitable for large projects. This is what I often hear as justification for introducing more formal development processes. So let’s play a large project scenario for Waterfall, Scrum and SMD and see how exactly SMD will loose this battle (I’m sure it …