The myth of maintainability
"Will this be maintainable in the long term?” - a comment on every code review ever
I have an allergic reaction to this question. It is often used when Developer A wants to add a non-trivial component to the codebase. The room (or code review) will always have Developer B who springs up the dubious concern of maintainability. Proceed with caution.
What do we exactly mean by maintainability as developers? Will the code be easy to understand for the next person to read it? This is readability, which could be seen as a factor in maintainability, and is valid. The more pressing interpretations tend to be along the lines of extensibility, abstraction, and hand-wavy higher level design or architecture.
The problem with the latter interpretations is the possible misunderstanding of why we write software. Software exists to drive a business need, add business value, and in the end — generate revenue. Let’s not waste time (and these discussions usually end up just wasting time).
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7 Lessons We Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in Under a Year
Alex Turnbull
Oct 17, 2013
After some early wins and epic fails, Groove launched to the public. We’ve come a long way, but not without some hurdles...
In the weeks after Groove’s public launch, we saw our user acquisition numbers grow slowly but steadily. And while any growth is good, slow and steady isn’t always enough when you have mounting bills and a team that depends on you to keep the paychecks coming.
Over the next several months, I learned more than I ever have in such a short period. We tested dozens of strategies and hacks, and explored hundreds of approaches to try and find the “magic bullet” to business growth.
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Redesigned Window Stops Sound But Not Air, Say Materials Scientists
Emerging Technology From the arXiv
July 8, 2013
..the notion of creating a barrier that absorbs sound while allowing the free of passage of air seems, at first thought, entirely impossible....
Noise pollution is one of the bugbears of modern life. The sound of machinery, engines, neighbours and the like can seriously affect our quality of life and that of the other creatures that share this planet.
But insulating against sound is a difficult and expensive business. Soundproofing generally works on the principle of transferring sound from the air into another medium which absorbs and attenuates it.
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Wired article with on Steve Jobs - before his second coming to Apple
The Wired Interview
By Gary Wolf, February 1996
Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.
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Useful to know when you are starting out and trying to sell to enterprise
Brandon’s posthaven
Brandon, 8 Aug , 2013
When my co-founder and I were starting out, we came from an engineering background and thought of sales as black magic. Divine the customer's deepest desires, howl a few bewitching incantations, and then—abracadabra—a contract would be conjured. Magic!
Two years of selling served as a painful exorcism. There's no magic to enterprise sales, but there's a hell of a lot of zoology. LTV, field sales, inside sales, CAC, prospects, leads, consumerization, channel sales, … the array of terms is bewildering and there's no textbook that explains how it all fits together.
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This is a great interview with Steve Jobs in 1995 just before he re-joined Apple.
Uploaded by Ivaylo Todorov
Oct 7, 2012
Clearly he knows what he is talking about and the thought process is super lucid. In his first stint at Apple he was very good. After NeXT he became great.
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This is a great summary with succinct elaboration of what User Stories are in Agile software development.
User Stories are a great addition to our repertoire of ways of expressing stakeholder requirements.
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Oct 12, 2013
