What I've Learned From Failure
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.
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
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