Stupid Matters

because software spends most of its life in maintenance, the cost of change makes most improvements to the cost to author irrelevant; in fact, some rapid authoring techniques make maintenance harder and increase the lifetime cost of software.

– Ian Cooper in “Is AI a Silver Bullet?“

In most cases, though, the only real solution is to avoid crossing the trust thermocline at all. It requires placing emotional engagement and trust at the heart of product strategy, and accepting that the causes of trust failures are non-linear. Businesses need to address their customers’ complaints early and not dilute the value of their product.

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Should both firms experience customer drop-off, then they will no doubt hunt for immediate causes and problems they can fix to “win” those customers back. In doing so they will have fallen into that well-worn trap of seeing their engagement model as a primarily linear system, when it isn’t.

Gareth Edwards, in Breaching the Trust Thermocline

It is a biological law that the larger an organism grows the greater is the ratio between its mass and its surface, the less exposure to the outside there is for the cells on the inside. As living organisms grow they have therefore to develop special organs of breathing, perspiration and excretion.

It is this law that sets a limit to the size of living organisms, that makes sure that the trees will not grow into the sky; and the business enterprise stands under this law as much as any other organism.

Peter Drucker, quoted in Authentic Leadership as Knowing What Your People Actually Do by Sheril Mathews

Because if you have any success at all, it will take up at least a decade of your life. And if you’re really lucky, you get to work on it for multiple decades.

Tracy Young, in “Part II: The failure points from $5m to $100m in ARR“

There are several free tools that provide the ability to see how your typography will look to people with varying color vision capabilities. Visit Material Design Accessibility Color Contrast Guidelines, Material Design Color and Accessibility, The Perception of Color, and Colour Blindness Awareness. To see what the three main types of color blindness look like, try out the Chromatic Vision Simulator application. To see if your choice of background and text colors meet color contrast guidelines, try the free WebAIM contrast checker tool.

Hilary Palmen How type influences readability

while being present is a worthy endeavor, it seems that almost every decision we make is either in response to appease our past or future self.

There is sufficient research to corroborate that distributed systems often times exhibit emergent behavior, which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole.

– Cindy Sridharan, in “Testing in Production, the Safe Way“

from Reforge’s Growth Series: Growth Wins

This lack of room for feedback does diminish the likelihood of being late or over budget. Yet, it increases the possibility of delivering an on-time and on-budget useless product that should not have been delivered at all.

Lucas F. Costa, in Why Long-Term Plans Don’t Work and How to Fix Them

wisdoms via Chase Thomet, Principal @ JMI Equity