#Gtd

Great little video from Jason Fried (ostensibly flogging Rework, 37Signals’ new book) on why modern offices are constructed to optimize interruptions and why you and I spend all our time on weekends and after work getting real work done.

Offices are optimized for interruptions and interruptions are the enemy of work, creativity, and productivity.

And yeah, the fact, I am working at home while penning this, instead of out surfing today, is probably a good indication of it as a truism.

Fantastic Do lecture from “Vagabonding”’s Rolf Potts, traveller extraordinaire, on taking some lessons from approaching travel to how you should live your real life. Definitely worth your time to watch the whole thing.

Best quote: “Life does not reward you with free time, you need to create it.”

The always astute Joel Spolsky talking about the book Coders at Work. Zeroes in on a interview with Joel Zawinski and the avoidance of technical fancy-pantsedness. Love this quote from Zawinski when asked about his pet peeve for over-engineering:

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.’

Shipping is a feature. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing.

Gene Kranz was Flight Director during the Apollo missions and the guy immortalized as the get it done person who helped get the Apollo 13 astronauts home when everyone else thought they were done for and famously attributed to the quotation “Failure is not an option.” This is what he said after the death of three astronauts in a training exercise in 1967 which became known as the Kranz Dictum:

Great post on Startup CTO mistakes I’d rather not repeat…

1. Not getting involved in “the business”
2. Keeping the technology vision in your head
3. Adopting bleeding-edge technology
4. Giving up control of the development process
5. Staying too hands-on and not getting hands-on enough

I actually found it interesting how these were still applicable to my current non-startup role.

The bleeding edge technology one is one I’ve managed to avoid (though my team would argue any open source and anything but java is bleeding edge), but I think more poignant is the one about giving up control of development since it makes it impossible to execute on a technology vision. And yeah, could probably be accused of keeping too much of the tech vision in my head (or not communicating it well enough). Sometimes what seems obvious and transparent when you’ve thought it up is pretty murky to other people (so add communicating it better as well).

It’s a bit sad I predate the moon landing, but this is kinda cool. In a few scant days, we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing which is a symbolic milestone that all humanity can be proud of despite what we’ve done in space since then.

I should point out I often use Kennedy’s example of this as a clear BHAG (Big, Hairy Audacious Goal), when talking about strategy planning because it has a clear, measurable, unambiguous achievement within a time limit.

Really useful article on how to start implementing continuous deployment in your organization. It encapsulates a lot of the stuff I just posted on the Five Whys and Lean Startups.

I can imagine a few other things you need here, like a complete sandbox for for each dev, as well as the continuous integration server to keep testing every commit, and the cultural change is enormous but not onerous.

I think the other important thing is that this is scary. Even me at my most crazy would be a bit concerned about this. People will be worried, especially if this is something you haven’t done from the very start. You also need a culture that doesn’t punish honest mistakes. Otherwise, people will fear to deploy something in short cycles from idea to production in nothing time.

Great article from the currently totally-on-fire Eric Ries.

One of the major things we’ve learned about user stories, even if we’ve never articulated it, is about “popping the why stack.” In essence, you ask “Why ?” a number of times and, if at the end of those five whys, the answer isn’t increasing revenue, protecting revenue, or reducing costs, that feature you’re writing probably isn’t worth the time.

I never realized the idea came from Toyota where it’s practically a gospel part of their keizen process in improving quality and reducing defects.

Really liked this article (dead link) by Lifehacker’s ex-hacker-in-chief Gina Trapani on her personal business model. Basically, it’s never always about the money (unless you’re a very shallow person). Primarily about freelancing, it has a nice framework for how to split your time between the benjamins and the other important things.

How she developed it her business model:

1. List of people you admire in business (and why)
2. List of people you enjoyed working with (and why)
3. Big Question: What do you want to accomplish ?

It distills to a 30/30/30/10 business model which is interesting. I’m hoping she updates this post at some point in the future with a followup telling us how the reality tracked to the ideal and what sort of tough decisions she might have made looking at that pie chart.

DHH (of Ruby on Rails fame) at Startup School (dead link). He did a very similar presentation at FOWA Dublin when I was there this year, but this is a nicer, refined version with him side by side with his slides.

I loved his comment about there being “not enough people trying to make a nice Italian restaurant in the webspace.”

Obviously, nothing earth shattering in here, but it’s wise to keep it in mind in an environment where everyone is trying to hit one over the fence a la facebook, youtube and twitter.