autumn links
As autumn deepens into winter with the first snow of the season here in Detroit, these are recent articles that have deepened my understanding of the world at the intersection of community, the open web, polity, & learning.
Tag: Technology
five beliefs
I’ve been thinking about Web-based community software for most of my life and have refined five beliefs for what must come next.
evaluating value
I find many senior software and IT folks don’t know how to talk about the value of tools. I frequently get asked by peers, inside my company and outside it, why I can successfully get tool expenses approved when theirs get rejected. Here’s my simple framework.
debugging everything
What is debugging, really? I’ve thought about it for most of my life and never really come up with a satisfactory answer until today.
owner insecurity
A hallmark of a healthy company is keeping incentives aligned with ownership. The only way to scale this is to focus on alignment, not control.
strategic capacity
In a small & fast engineering team, it’s challenging to quantify work being done. There’s so much to do, and it’s difficult to categorize. How can you determine your capacity for addressing your strategic roadmap when stakeholders ask about it?
community signal
Patrick O’Keefe of the long-running show Community Signal asked me to join him in a discussion that ranged from private equity buying community software, community data ownership, and the stakeholder challenges of community software roadmaps.
weighted web
Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat.
devaluing quality
Software building is a team activity, and QA is an indispensable stakeholder on a well-functioning team.
feudalistic software
Have you ever noticed nearly all Web software is feudalistic? I share three important pieces from academics that capture the issue.
victory laps
Moments worthy of victory laps come from stories which have a beginning, middle, and end. If you’re not actively communicating these stories to a team, eventually startup-era victory laps fade into memory.
porter deux
10% of all commits on the decade-old project are now mine from this past month. So, things are moving briskly.
nitro porter
A week ago I forked a decade-old open source project and Nitro Porter was born.
search products
This is a brief technical review of open source search index products currently available, summarizing what I learned about them in a couple days of research.
escape delta
A moment of conceptual breathing room by putting forward a well-articulated, divergent view could save a ton of resources later.
open investments
I recently read “Why I wouldn’t invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one” by Wolfram Hempel and started to write a very long comment, but decided I’d just publish my own counterpoint instead.
build off
I’m lately watching The Great British Bake Off. When I thought about why you couldn’t do a similar show about programming, I realized the hurdles to televising it are the same hurdles teams face anyway.
real community
I don’t think many of us understand what a community is or how to support one. We’ve built a lot of software to help people talk, and very little to help them build community.
unsemantic versions
Are you old enough to remember Firefox 2.0? It was a huge deal. Why did semantic versioning kill “big deal” releases and what could we do instead?
10x developers
The myth of the “10x Developer” is rooted in pure technical fluency and short-term growth metrics, and it’s a dangerous narrative to sustainable teams and products.
using forums
Offering community managers a forum to build a community is like giving a project manager a kanban board. Yes, they can make it work. But is there really a “kanban market”?
context puzzles
What is software development really if not a sprawling, borderless puzzle for which the lid with the big picture on it is long gone? To me, it seems obvious that the biggest hurdle to team-based software development is how difficult it is to communicate well.
black box
The greatest sin of any developer is thinking they are cleverer than the users of what they build. “I can guess what you want.” In truth, guessing what someone wants is far easier than helping them achieve what they actually want.
platform syndicate
Platforms exist to remove interaction barriers between users. The folly of platforms is believing they can entirely rely on algorithms to control & shape human interaction.
social graph
When’s the last time you heard anyone talk about the “social graph”? It turns out it was all just another way to sell ads and nothing more.
delicious clicks
The most dangerous idea on the web is that it’s for search engines.
square one
Maybe it’s just a story I’m making up, but this Web doesn’t feel like the dream we were all working toward. What are we doing here, anyway?