In what must be one of the most serendipituous moments of my recent life I hit upon 37Signals' Getting Real TOC page after doing a search of a string of text that randomly entered my mind. (The whole book's available online for free? Wow!) I'd first read Getting Real in its physical form (borrowed from a local... Continue Reading →
Building an Antifragile System
I just completed the testing of a new program I wrote. 500 lines of well-commented code, making debugging easy if necessary. With this program, the reports we run daily in the morning would take 10 minutes instead of the usual hour, and fully-automated too. Without any manual inputs, the potential failure points owing to manual... Continue Reading →
On antifragility and new stuff
Taleb once again scores with me with his book on “antifragility”. Like his book on randomness and black swans, this book has opened my mind to a concept that I’ve intuitively felt but never been able to put down in words. I wrote once about “destroying things” to love them more – making new things... Continue Reading →
Analytics Adoption: Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary Technology
In this post about analytics adoption, I'd like to start with a short story. The wife and I got ourselves each a Samsung Galaxy S4 over the weekend. Though it’s a great phone, we couldn’t help but feel that there was a distinct lack of a “wow” factor. We both moved to the S4 from... Continue Reading →
User requests are like hunger pangs
“So, when is the [request] going to be ready?” he asks me, the fourth person to ask in a one-week period. This, I think to myself, is probably real hunger. “I’m working on it,” I reply, which means I’m waiting it out to determine how important the request really is. The moment I can confidently... Continue Reading →