All the things I do instead of writing…
Captain hindsight is in full swing at the moment. Everyone apparently knew FTX was not solvent, and would obviously crash. Everyone thought lockdowns were a terrible idea that would leave us all paying the bill for a decade. They weren't all hankering for more restrictions and judging people for having a cup of coffee with... Continue Reading →
How to fail at not failing
From the frustrating of trying to stitch together too many fitness gadgets, to whether financial services technology is suffering from a brain drain.
I wrote some time ago that my new Surface was irritating and I didn't understand the hype. THis statement now somewhat reminds me of the venture capitalist I worked for in 1999, who was talking about how he wouldn't take any IPO shares in Google because they were way overpriced. "What's the point of Google,... Continue Reading →
Interesting article on scrum/agile, even if I don’t quite agree with it.
Agility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t really think that the Agile/Waterfall dichotomy is useful in the first place.
There’s a variety of Agile, called Scrum, that I’ve seen actually kill a company. By “kill”, I don’t mean “the culture wasn’t as good afterward”. Rather, I mean that its stock dropped by almost 90 percent in less than two years.
What is Agile?
Agile grew up in web consulting, where it had a certain amount of value: when dealing with finicky clients who don’t know what they want, one typically has to choose between one of two options. The first is to manage the client: get expectations set, charge appropriately for rework, and maintain a relationship of equality rather than submission…
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I have grown to hate all things Apple. I have had two ipads, and countless ipods - which these days are sort of obsolete anyway. The other day, my Ipad charger failed yet again; or rather, Apple clocked the fact it wasn't an approved charger that they want to charge some ludicrous fortune for, and... Continue Reading →
Right now, I am doing a correspondence course in Agile Project Management with Scrum. It's the same as most IT training courses, managing to be both obvious and a bit complicated to implement in practice. There are about twelve people attending in person, and three people sitting around in the countryside somewhere, who are required to... Continue Reading →
The resting writer 