improvement
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🚀 Accelerating or Decelerating?
Is your work accelerating or decelerating? This may be hard to measure, but in our gut we know. A few ideas: Where do we spend our time? Moving things forward, or just keeping things afloat? Are we releasing more or less often? How about t…
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🥉 Good, fast, cheap - choose three
A familiar phrase states: “Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.” This is similar to the development triangle. Which states that everything is a tradeoff. However, improving all three becomes possible when doing things differently. That is the …
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🚀 The BIG Release vs. 🌊 a Continuous flow of Value
How do we look at a product release? As a big one-time event, where we spend heroic efforts to pull it over the finish line? Or as a continuous flow of high-quality value into the product (even before the customer ever sees it) that is main…
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⚖️ Technical debt compounds with you doing nothing
Technical debt is like any other kind of debt – it accrues when nothing is done. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of debt. How does technical debt work? Mainly that software (and technology in general) moves on (especially OSS), an…
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🐛Kernighan's Law
Kernighan’s Law: Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Cliff’s Law: In three months, it will be thr…
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🔄 Closed-loop engineering
What are some ways we can close the loop in engineering efforts? Systematic testing User feedback These ensure whatever we build works and is useful.
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🔄 Closed-loop humans
What are some ways we as humans can close the loop? Listen Reflect Write Without these, we operate in a largely open-loop mode without the feedback we need to improve or correct our course. Action bias is good, but it helps to know we are…
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🔄 Look for closed loops
Closed loop systems are stable. Why? Because they learn and self-correct. In any system, process, person, or organization, look for closed loops. If something is not working, chances are there is an open loop.
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🔄 Close the loop with AI
There is a fascinating statement in a recent MIT study that claims 95% of organizations are getting zero return from GenAI investments. The core barrier to scaling is not infrastructure, regulation, or talent. It is learning. Most GenAI sy…
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🔄 AI and documentation - close the loop
Starting with good documentation is often a better way to use AI. However, you can also close the loop and have AI update the documentation when it is finished. It can fill in details, clean things up, etc. This closes the loop. Then repeat…
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🔄 Open loops -> technical debt
If something is corrected, it needs to be fed back and incorporated, so you don’t keep redoing the same stuff over and over and eventually bury yourself in technical debt. Effective organizations close the loop.
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⬆️ The business case for improvement
As discussed previously, improvement is sometimes hard – really hard. So how do we justify it? The payback comes when we improve something once, and then something else gets lots easier many times. An example might be automating a release p…
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⬆️ The path of improvement
Improvement is not always easy, actually it is usually hard – really hard, and sometimes a complex path. But in the end, something likely got simpler for someone. Getting to complex is easy and the natural state of things (chaos). The path …
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⬆️ What is improvement?
Improvement often means something got simpler for someone: We refactored the code and it is now easier to read. The build system is more reliable. The automated tests are better, so less manual testing is needed. The documentation is bette…
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⚡ Improve development efficiency, reduce technical debt
The term “platform” can mean a lot of things, but this is primarily what I’m talking about in the context of product development: Improve development efficiency, reduce technical debt Some examples: do more with what you have iterate fa…
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💪 Good enough is not good enough
My grandfather had this sign on his desk for years, and it embodied his philosophy for work. He did things right. He read manuals for his equipment cover to cover. He understood how things worked. And because of this, he could fix and maint…
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🔧 What will you improve today?
Platforms are all about improvement – at the personal, team, and company levels. One approach is to each day write down something you are going to improve and set aside a small block of time daily to work on it. Make this part of your perso…