platform
-
🧹 zephyr-snmp v0.1.0 - a huge cleanup!
zephyr-snmp adds SNMP v1 and v2c support to the Zephyr RTOS. It started as a port of the lwIP SNMP code, and along the way I concluded it would be easier to maintain if it went fully Zephyr-native: Zephyr code style, Zephyr APIs, etc. What …
-
🛣️ The two ditches
Along roads, there is often a ditch or some undesirable obstacle on either side of the road you want to avoid. The same can be said for most of life, including product development. There are two common errors: Build it all yourself: You dr…
-
⏱️ How do you find time for higher value tasks?
Do you (and by extension your organization) find yourself mired in minutia and struggling to find time for higher value tasks? What is the solution? You can hire more people to do the lower-value stuff (a perfectly valid approach). You can …
-
🔗 Platform thinking does not mean we don't use other platforms
On the contrary, platform thinking readily embraces other tools and platforms. The difference is: We add our own tooling, integration, and workflows into the mix. We own the integration points so we can readily swap out/in 3rd party compon…
-
📖 The definition of the word 'Platform'
The definition of the word “platform” includes things like the following: Acts as foundational for other products or services, not the final end product itself. Provides a stable base. Typically supports multiple, distinct applications or …
-
🔄 Platform Thinking is a habit
Platform Thinking in the context of product development has many parallels to effective habits in personal life. With personal exercise, healthy eating, getting enough sleep, and reading good books - these are difficult to start, but easy o…
-
🎯 Who is Platform Thinking for?
Platform Thinking is for anyone who wants to take the friction out of creating, publishing, testing, integrating, and deploying products. The result? Value. Quality. Timeliness.
-
⏳ The long-term compression timeline
Below are several timelines illustrating long-term compression comparing a product development timeline: 20 years ago Today Today with Platform Thinking The big effect of long-term compression is that negative consequences can hit much ea…
-
🗜️ Long-term compression
One reality of developing products with modern technology is the compression of the short and long-term. Today, the consequences of actions come back on the timeframe of months instead of years, as it might have been ten or twenty years ago…
-
🚀 Platforms are not just for developers
This is an interesting post from a Marketing person creating website pages: I built 19 website pages in a single day while my team was out for US thanksgiving. Not mockups. Not placeholders. Actual, shippable pages: a full partner ecosyste…
-
🤔 Isn't this just agile?
A reader responded to the last post with a comment: Isn’t “agile” a part of product thinking too? That doesn’t seem linear? This is a good question. Agile covers a lot of ground. The Agile Manifesto states: We are uncovering better ways …
-
🏆 What is the ultimate platform success?
The ultimate platform success is when an internal platform turns into a sellable product/service, or an open source project. Perhaps some companies succeed by starting out building a platform as a product, but the greatest platform successe…
-
🥉 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 …
-
⏳ The "long-term" may be closer than you think...
A common objection to “Platform Thinking” (proactively build your platform from the start) is: there isn’t time right now; this can be done after the 1.0 release when there is ample time and resources. The “long-term” can be defined as when…
-
🛠️ The new Artisan Age
We live in a world of powerful tools. Milwaukee battery-powered hand tools, high-end PCB design suites, cloud platforms, open-source tools, etc. And while these tools get us a good way toward the goal, they do not do everything. Additionall…
-
🏗️ The difference between Product and Platform
Product is what you build. Platform is how you build. Most people build the first and outsource the second. After all, the product has the IP—the secret sauce—the valuable part. However, we observe in successful companies a focus on their i…
-
⚖️ 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…
-
🌀 Complex systems are hard to predict
My wife makes sourdough, which is a multi-day process and at times unpredictable. Recently, the current batch was a little sluggish and not expanding like it should, so she “fed” it and left it on the counter. It took off during the night a…
-
💰 What is the cheapest PDM tool out there?
Product Data Management (PDM) is how you manage and publish your product data. The goal is to ensure all the stakeholders share a common understanding, confusion is minimized, and quality is maintained. The simplest PDM system is to put a b…
-
📁 The file dilemma
There is this movement against files in most disciplines. Files are hard to manage, track, version, and secure (unless you use Git). Thus, a lot of tools have moved to SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications in the cloud. Jon Hirschtick a…
-
✨ Anyone can write scripts now
With Claude Code (and likely many other AI technologies), anyone can write scripts now. Instead of writing in a technical language like Python or Bash, you can now write a sequence of commands with some rules in plain English, and Claude tr…
-
📈 What do we mean by scaling?
This can mean many things: More units sold More customers served More people doing the work More features More innovation More models produced More model options More quality We could go on, but basically we mean more of something over ti…
-
🌱📈 Simplicity scales
When programming, we learn that simple interfaces and simple data structures are good, because they are flexible. Simple file formats are the same. We can do way more with a CSV or Markdown file in terms of presentation and automation than …
-
🧩 The three legs of YOUR Platform
Automation – start with a checklist. Collaboration – #1 rule is don’t view email as a permanent place to store information. Process – the habits of your organization.
-
✅ The Platform Test
How do you know if you own YOUR Platform? If a customer needs a new hardware interface or connector on a product, can you easily add that? If a security vulnerability is found in a piece of software in your stack, can you fix it? If a custo…
-
🔄 What is YOUR Platform? (v2)
Had a nice visit with Rod and he asked me to describe what a Platform is in 20 words or less, so here we go: YOUR Platform is the collection of technology, tools, and processes that enable you to differentiate and consistently deliver your …
-
🏢 What is your Platform?
What is a Platform? There are many ways to look at this. Some might think of AWS, GCP, iOS, Android, etc. These are certainly platforms, but they are not your platform. Your platform is the collection of technology, tools, and processes you…