Last night I attended a thought-provoking presentation by Jateen Parekh, CTO and co-founder of a super cool start-up called Jelli. The premise behind Jelli is to allow people to influence and control what they’re listening to on the radio — a great idea whose time has definitely come. Jateen is clearly passionate not only about [...]
Archive for the ‘Make It Worth It’ Category
17 Oct
Rule #15: Inertia is a powerful force in the software development process.
In the way, way, way early days of our company, even though there were only two of us working on the product (including myself), we agreed to a few things. We would: Do upfront design through specs Adhere to test-driven development (TDD) Commit to awesome uptime Now, in the early days, we didn’t necessarily need to [...]
13 Oct
Rule #12: Make it ugly.
In the early days of a project, when you and your team have a nice, warm, fuzzy idea for how your McWidget 2000 is going to completely blow the doors off the entire McWidget industry, it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the details, especially when it comes to the user interface. “Hey, Tommy, [...]
25 Oct
Rule #10: Focus on people and pain, not features and functionality.
Writing great software starts with two simple questions: Who am I creating this for? How are they hurting? Focusing on people and pain helps you define why you building what you are. And understanding the why can help answer a lot of questions throughout the development process. However, many discussions in the software industry instead [...]
1 Oct
Rule #3: Think new, and think big.
If you buy into the first rules — that is, you love software and you agree that mostly, stuff doesn’t work — then rule #3 is sort-of the natural combination of those two rules. Basically, if you — or your team — is going to spend a lot of time working on something, and that [...]
1 Oct
Rule #2: Mostly, stuff doesn’t work.
Great software developers know a very basic fact about software development: mostly, stuff doesn’t work. I don’t know why this is as true as it is, but it just is. I suspect it might have something to do with entropy, or maybe some weird chemical reaction that gets triggered inside the human brain when a [...]
1 Oct
Rule #1: You have to love software to build software.
Building software is a ridiculous art. You sit in a dark room somewhere for hours on end, sitting way to close to a TV screen, giving yourself carpel tunnel syndrome. Typing, over-and-over again, the same 100 words or so, in different combinations, and if you don’t do it more-or-less perfectly, everything breaks. Sometimes you do [...]
