It feels like I’m entering some sort of phase where the focus is on some of my mental models. One of those is flight levels. Solutions have different flight levels. Conventionally, a flight level is the altitude at which an airplane is flying. The higher up you are changes significantly what you can see. You […]
There’s words I use a lot at work. One of them is capability. What’s a capability? It’s something your system can do, kind of like a skill or feature. If you’re building a content management system, and that content management system can display blocks of HTML, and not only rich text, that’s a capability. It’s […]
There must be a special place where all the abstractions that were never needed, but still built, go when a project is abandoned. Today I want to talk about optimising for frequency. What I mean by that is to make the things you do often during development of a thing really easy, while not getting […]
Note: I was not sure if I should publish this post, because it very much feels like i’m putting folks in too broad categories – I’m not, it’s one of the many mental models I use at work, when leading teams. I’m writing this with many grains of salt, and I’d ask you to read […]
When I was 13 or 14 and went to school, we did have a computer room. Probably multiple computer rooms, and they had computers that were running Word and other standard software of that era. Thinking back, one thing I can not not chuckle about is how Word still takes exactly as long to start […]
Recently I helped doing some renovations in my daughter’s kindergarten. It was a fun weekend project with some fellow moms and dads, and one of the other parents really stood out. While we were all somewhat equally motivated, he brought a very interesting skill to the table: improvising solutions that made problems go away. It […]
Today was interesting. But let’s digress first. When I was first using turn by turn navigation systems, one of the really surprising discoveries was that the shortest and the fastest route are not necessarily the same thing. There are quite some instances where they are actually completely different, like when you go for a longer […]
You need to deploy software all the time. That’s my believe, and here’s why. Let’s start at the beginning, though. What is a deployment? For the discussion here it’s basically the process of moving code from wherever it is to production. For software that means that hypothetical value turns into real value exactly at that […]
Have an idea? Write it down. Made a plan how to tackle something? Write it down. Disagree with something? Write it down. Writing is brilliant in that it does two things at the same time: It makes you express something in a form that is easy to consume for others, and it comes with a […]
There’s probably nothing cheaper than an idea. Truth be told, I’m not a particular fan of ideas. They are one of the most necessary things you want to have in your engineering team, but ideas need to be carefully managed. They should operate in a space somewhere between problems and actual solutions. They’re glueing two […]