Aphorism 72
If I want to have a thought of mine preserved for eternity, I put it on my blog; if I don’t care if I ever see it again, I put it on Twitter. John Scalzi Original post
Posts By Stefan Czerniawski
Date() with destiny
Computers are dumb. Humans are smart. So it makes sense for computers to do as much of the smart part as possible and leave the humans to cope with what the computers can’t do. Sometimes that is most obvious in little things, such as entering information in ways which any human could make immediate senseRead… Read more »
How many things does government do?
Easy: 1,479,025,887 GDS has produced another fascinating tool, this time providing a list and volumes of government transactional services, which it turns out are used a shade under one and a half billion times a year. Richard Sargeant has a blog post introducing the endeavour, and making clear that this initial version is an alphaRead… Read more »
Aphorism 71
I’ve never seen a situation where a large company’s problem was too much internal cooperation. Jeremy Leader Original post
Interesting elsewhere – 11 July 2012
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web Software Inventory – Joel on Software Every product attracts new feature ideas, and you can’t implement ideas as fast as you can think them up, so you write them down, and this list is called the feature backlog. A lot of the ideas on the backlogRead… Read more »
Infrastructure, superstructure and not enough sockets
It can be hard to reverse bad decisions. It can be hard to recover from having failed to anticipate the future. It can be hard not having enough power sockets in hotel rooms. There is an old (but sadly discredited) story that the design of Roman chariots constrained the design of the space shuttle. ItRead… Read more »
Aphorism 69
Things only become possible after you are bored to death of talking about them. Ben Goldacre, quoted by Hakim Yadi Original post
If you want to change the system, you have to change the system
If you want to change a system, you have to understand the system you want to change. If you want to reform the civil service, you have to understand why it is the way it is. Part of that is undoubtedly about its internal structures, operations and cultures, but part of it – and aRead… Read more »
#bowlerhats
I am a pompous faceless bureaucrat, devoid of anything even faintly resembling a sense of humour. I spend my days correcting the drafting of my junior colleagues, usually by annotating the margins with Latin tags, using a carefully selected shade of violet ink in my fountain pen. By such means, I steadfastly pursue my goal,Read… Read more »
Minimum viable should also be maximum attainable
Last week, in a post ostensibly about fixing printers (so all is forgiven if you glazed over and didn’t read it), I talked about rapid and iterative design, but wondered how minimal a minimum viable product could be: There is a risk the other way too, though: how good does it have to be toRead… Read more »