Continuations

We don't do very well with predicting the future because we fail to anticipate non-linearity. This is apparent almost anywhere you look. Most people when they hear that the average temperature of the earth might rise by a couple of degrees, seem to have a mental image of a slightly warmer summer and maybe a bit less snow in winter (if you live in a place that has snow in winter). Very few people associate such a seemingly small change with the possibility of deserts in places that are lu...

Yesterday we had a little snafu at one of the companies I work with. Some users received duplicate and even triplicate reminder emails. This snafu was caused by what I consider to be one of the key mistakes when first working on production systems: rookies trust their own code. By this I mean assuming that code you wrote yourself has the behavior you think it should have and then not guarding in other code against possible errors. The particular case in question involved two parts: code to id...

In manufacturing, when stuff goes wrong, there tends to be physical evidence, such as a part with holes in the wrong place. It is therefore often easy to find the immediate cause of the problem, which might be to say that the wholes were drilled in the wrong place and go yell at the person who does the drilling. But in Kaizen, the immediate cause of a problem is only the beginning of the analysis, not the end. The team is supposed to start with the problem and ask “Why?” seven times to determ...

One of my favorite Kaizen techniques is visualization. On the shopfloor this takes the form of large signs that graphically display key quality metrics. The charts show overall trendlines but also break out individual teams. This is a powerful motivator. When there are large gains in quality, the credit can go to the team(s) that produced the progress. Conversely, when the overall chart shows a dip or a slow down in improvement, it is often readily apparent which team is responsible. Some peo...

One mantra that is often brought up for entrepreneurs is to “fail early” (and some add “and often”). The theory is that if your business is not working it’s better to fold before you have spent a lot of money and try something else instead from scratch. There is not just the money - if you go too long in one direction you build an organization that has inertia in that direction making it difficult if not impossible to change direction. I have certainly seen this happen firsthand many times an...

Many of the high growth companies in our portfolio have run into scaling issues. There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between the choice of architecture and organizational scaling. Some architectures lend themselves much better to organizational scaling than others. A horizontal approach with a Data Access Layer, a Business Logic Layer, and a Presentation Layer suffers from a lot of organizational c...

A big step forward towards cloud computing and a potential breakthrough in scalability for startups. I (may) have found a new platform.

I have always encouraged companies to spend on great chairs, keyboards and multiple monitors for developers. This was based on the conventional wisdom (among developers) that more screen real estate is better. Recently, NEC sponsored a study that finds actual productivity benefits from using multiple displays. The study was conducted at the University of Utah. Ars Technica published a good overview and you can find a detailed summary directly from NEC. Interestingly, the study shows that ther...

The team at Twilio has done an amazing job making telephony accessible to developers. Making and accepting calls, as well as sending and receiving texts is now as easy as a couple of lines of code. The simplicity of Twilio’s API is such that most developers are literally up and running within minutes. At the same time because of the ingenious REST API which makes calls and messages addressable, there is no limit to the complexity of the applications that can be created using Twilio. Now Twili...

I have written previously that given the huge scale of the Internet, services that might historically have been considered a feature can now be companies. There is a critical success factor though to achieving Internet scale that I think is being widely ignored: intentionally keeping a service “underdetermined." What does that mean? A service is underdetermined if it allows for many use cases including ones that were never possibly anticipated during the creation of the service. Conversely, a...