Category: Makers
-
Allow projects to have exploration time
We’ve been working on some terrific discovery stage projects in my team. We are all super pumped about it. Team has come up with some fresh ideas and a vision to execute on. However, we are very much seasoned in working within fixed structured, mature projects. Usually, we either work on small pieces or large…
-
Do all software engineers care about customer impact?
I got into a fun chat with my friends about unengaged people at work. Do software engineers care about salary, solving a problem technically (discovery), shipping, or does that work has to have impact in someone else’s life? Of course, different people find joy in many points within this spectrum of outcomes. Interesting question surfaced:…
-
Business outcomes vs customer outcomes
My parents grow a bunch of fruits and vegetables at home. Their little garden produces about 1000 oranges, all at the same time. So my mum calls around to see if any of her family and friends will take some off her hands. My parents would make trips to all their friends’ places with boxes…
-
How much planning is enough?
Few years back, I was sitting in Bunker Coffee with Luke for our 1:1. Luke tells me, “you know, no matter how hard you plan, the error rate of our decision doesn’t change much. If we take path A today versus next week, after having a whole lot more meetings, we still don’t know what…
-
Conflict Resolution
Recently, my friend shared this story over dinner. He is an iOS developer. He had been tasked to create a core component for his company’s design system: a container view that sweeps over other views. But there was an issue with how padding was applied. The designer in charge of the component insisted there should…
-
Companies Grow
As successful products increase in revenue, companies grow. Growth allows a company to improve their products, support more customers and create additional value-add services. Growing up isn’t easy. As a handful of engineers become hundreds, or even thousands, the added weight introduces many issues. These can often lead to the opposite outcomes of what growth…
-
Hackathons
I don’t like Hackathons. I remember when they went from fun to not-so-fun. I was part of the frontend modernisation project at Expedia. It was a long arduous project, filled with many many technical and people challenges. I loved it. Every day felt like a rush and we were doing something difficult that was going…
-
Learnings from “Seeing like a State” by James C Scott
Seeing like a State inspects attempts of states bringing “administrative order of nature and society” that’s led to disastrous outcomes. It is an interesting window into inspecting how large, people based systems work at scale. High Modernism The book inspects state’s appetite to use “high modernism” to solve issues at scale. “High modernism is a…
-
Getting a taste for making
Few years back, my brother and I decided to work on an iPhone app together. It was a little note taking app that I dreamt up to help me record lectures while taking notes. We gave it a terrible name… “notes + u”. App didn’t make it. It wasn’t a million dollar idea. We didn’t…