You have an internal storyteller, and they are always telling you a story. Today the story is, “Almost done with all of my bugs. There were ten at the beginning of the week, but now I have two. One of them is hard, but I’ll figure it out. The other, I’m sure, will be a… more
We’re going to play a really simple and really dumb game. I’ll explain the setup and the rules: Two one-person ‘teams.’ On a flat, boring surface, you draw two parallel three feet long white lines which are fifty feet apart. Teams choose one home baseline. The other line marks the opposing team’s home base. Team… more
I inherited Eli’s code. He’d left for a start-up, and he’d written the import/export code for our application half done. He’d left in a hurry which meant I got a sixty-minute whiteboard session where he explained where he was at and where he was planning on going with his code. The whiteboard was pleasantly covered… more
My first job in technology was a QA internship. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I tested the first release of Paradox for Windows at Borland. As an intern, I started by following someone else’s QA test plan – dutifully checking each test off the list. After a few weeks, I knew my… more
A few years ago I wrote a piece that romanticized the state of the sky falling. The article is not about fixing disasters, it’s about preventing them, but no matter how much you prepare, disasters happen. The romance surrounding disasters is history speaking. When the disaster shows up and you see it, no one but… more
Dear Summer Interns: Your stock is up — like way up. Ten years ago when I was hiring interns at the mothership, my incredibly flawed and shortsighted policy was to hire as many as they’d let me, dole ’em out to the teams that screamed the loudest, and see what happened. There were successes, we… more
On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard. The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in… more
The brother-in-law lives in the ‘burbs and needed five trees removed. Not big trees — 10 to 15 feet tall, six-inch trunks. Not a problem. I live on the edge of a redwood forest in Northern California. There are sturdy oaks, playful maples, lovely madrones, weed-like bay laurels, and, of course, giant redwoods. But the… more
Larry was pissing me off. We were a year into a two-year development process. Far enough along to have confidence that we could do it, but not far enough to be sure when we would get there. Features were claimed to be done, but each build of the product was a study in broken and… more
Buried. Back at the start-up, we were shifting gears. After six months of talking about shipping a product, we needed to ship a product and nothing gets everyone’s attention like a deadline. The good news was that QA had been doing its job and there was a pile of work in our bug database. The… more
