What I've Learned From Failure
Free!
With Membership
$7.99
Suggested price

What I've Learned From Failure

A quarter-century of experience shipping software, distilled into fixnum bittersweet essays

About the Book

Reg "Raganwald" Braithwaite has been working as a professional software developer since 1986, in roles ranging from Sorceror's Apprentice to Vice-President, Development. "What I've Learned From Failure" collects his very best "non-technical" essays on the subject of shipping software into a lean but concentrated book (51 pages).

Manufactured from nearly 100% recycled blog posts. "What I’ve Learned From Failure" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

About the Author

Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite
Reg “raganwald” Braithwaite

When he's not shipping CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Ruby, and Java applications scaling out to millions of users, Reg "Raganwald" Braithwaite creates programming libraries such as Allong.es, Method Combinators, Katy, JQuery Combinators, YouAreDaChef, andand, and others.

He writes primarily about programming. Find out more on his  home page.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
    • copyright notice
  • About The Author
    • contact
  • What I’ve Learned From Failure
    • Why does failure matter?
    • The four most important causes of failure
    • People
    • Action
    • Details
    • The Schedule
    • Software
    • Power
    • History
    • Finishing
  • The Not So Big Software Design
    • Lemons
    • Building Better, Not Buzzwordier
    • Where is the client?
    • Better Software Architecture
  • Which Theory Fits the Evidence?
    • why do theory p and theory d matter?
    • belief drives behaviour
    • so which theory fits the evidence?
    • d is for “d’oh! we should have gone with p!”
  • Interlude: The Programmer’s Dilemma
  • Project Management acts like a Marketplace for Information
    • what kind of information sells?
  • Bricks
    • software is not made of bricks
    • assumption: it’s all about moving bricks
    • software development is difficult to parallelize
    • software is transfinite
    • building software without treating it like a pile of bricks
  • Trial-and-error with a feedback cycle
    • trial and error
    • feedback
    • productization
    • the scarce resource
  • Software’s Receding Hairline
    • receding hairlines
    • the tyranny of the urgent
  • Interlude: The Mouse Trap
    • The New Guy
    • Excel, VBA, XML, XSLT, Java!
    • Epilogue
  • Duck Programming
    • prelude: the project
    • what is duck programming?
    • why duck tastes so good
    • dangerous but manageable
    • how to manage duck programming
    • summary
  • I Can’t Find Good Salespeople

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

80% Royalties. Earn $16 on a $20 book.

We pay 80% royalties. That's not a typo: you earn $16 on a $20 sale. If we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book or course for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub