Planning is preparation of the mind. It’s impossible to quantify every variable, every assumption, and every potential future state. Attempting to do so will simply boil the ocean and frustrate everybody around you. Analytics leaders tend to be very specific types of folk. Here are a few heuristics that might be useful for us in particular. Backcasting Backcasting is primarily an expression of preferences. The exercise almost always begins with an enunciation of a preferred, desirable, future state. Consider the following statement: “By 2016, we will be a 1 billion dollar company.” Such a statement, be it vision statements, stretch goals, or just goals, are typically not based on any sort of forecast. It’s entirely possible, and very likely, that[…]

Ben Firshman ported a Super Nintendo emulator to javascript. JSNES has a few games (ROMS) ported over too, included Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda 2. That’s pretty cool. Quite a few people grew up with the Super Nintendo. Some of us even looked into going to school to code for it. The code was a form of assembly. It wasn’t abstracted behind a layer of nice language. But I suspect that quite a few shops had kits to make development easier. Developers usually had to manipulate memory directly. They had to. They only had a few memory busses and 21MhZ to work with. No clean garbage collection for them. All of this can now run in a[…]