What I've Learned From Failure
Last updated on 2014-10-08
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
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
Authors have earned$8,419,034writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub,
earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
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), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for 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
