Cycle-time and mid-life crises

A quotation from Paypal founder Max Levchin in an otherwise typical wrong-footed article at I, Cringely : “What you want to do,” he said, “is listen to your customers and bring out every two weeks improved versions that would each take your competitor two months to complete. That’s when you are on a rocket—they can’t [...]

Google does IM out in the open

In the latest installment of the Google, MSN and Yahoo macho stand-off, Google has added IM capability. At first I groaned at this – another IM identity, another IM client, another closed protocol – my business card has no room left for more cryptic letters. But I was wrong – it seems Google is truly [...]

Agile builds

An extremely confused article in the SDTimes today. What they get right is that a “build bottleneck” is a common feature of large agile projects and one of the big challenges in scaling Agile. “Streamlining the build process is a quality-of-life issue for developers.” Absolutely right, but as importantly a slow build process lengthens quality [...]

Meetings, meetings, everywhere

My ongoing rant about meetings echoed on to-done.com A good tip, I thought: “Set a time limit. Then think about cutting it in half. If you think you want an hour meeting, try a half-an-hour. For some reason people think that an hour is “standard duration” for a meeting.” I don’t know about you, but [...]

Why I choose open source

I’m fed of hearing people gripe that Open Source is unattractive to companies because there’s no support contract attached. Yesterday I had a problem with an open source package manager we use called DarwinPorts. One of the packages, no matter how much I fiddled with it, wouldn’t install. I posted a message to the mailing [...]

A couple of quick links

We’ve all had days like this: Hullo, Technical Support Wouldn’t it be great if we painted every wall?

Business and open source

Good piece from Paul Graham that connects amateurish enthusiasm with productivity, start-ups and open source software. Choice quotes: “At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.” “Google is a rare example of a big company in tune [...]