Michael's Workbench

Are best practices always best?

Best practices are like training wheels – they are helpful, but they won’t help you win Tour de France. Current norms were created by breaking away from previous norms. Stick to best practices where you don’t care to stand out, be the rebel to create your spotlight moments. And always keep an open mind.
Imagine There’s a Book

This is an over-simplified analogy I use to explain the difference between IC (individual contributor) levels in engineering jobs: Imagine there’s a book that describes everything we do and how we do it. Junior Engineer: Bought the book, started reading it. Engineer: Read the book, understands and can apply most of it. Senior Engineer: Knows…
You got 2 seconds … go!

Reading Why yesterday, I ran into a reference to interesting research experiment. Shank, Pearson and Dickinson in 1989 would display a triangle on the screen in response to user pressing a key on the keyboard. Users would then answer a question as to whether the triangle appeared in response to the keyboard press or not. The finding…
Storytelling, or How to Help People Remember Boring Stuff

Short version If you want people to remember stuff, make a good story Slightly longer version In my previous post, I wrote about communication, focusing mostly on writing to get people to do stuff. I thought, I’d be done with the topic of communication and move on to other stuff, but something happened. Earlier this week…
Writing to Get Things Done

I had an interesting conversation at work recently about emails, specifically long emails. Some thoughts on how to make those emails more effective are below. Short version: Slightly longer version: The shortest path to one’s heart is through the ribcage Anonymous (this is from a guy who is known to ask for status updates by…
Another interesting quote

I believe this needs to be memorized (or at least read) by anyone who ever had to manage people or projects: If you take a flat map And move wooden blocks upon it strategically, The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should. The science of war is moving live men like blocks. And…
Well, this explains a lot

My new favorite quote: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it”Alberto Brandolini Thank you, sir, well said!
What to Demo?

A classic Agile practice is that a demo at the end of the sprint includes everything that was done in that sprint. The purpose of the demo is to report on the backlog items as being done, and get a sign-off from product owner. What do you show in that demo? For new features, that…
When is development done?

“the code is done”, “the feature is done” – what does that mean? To me, development is “done” when the followin things have happened: