Technical debt builds up in software over time. It is the summation of all the liabilities built into the technology over time. It impedes the ease of adding new features and increases the cost of keeping the product functioning. For those that do not understand technical debt, it is enraging. Why Technical Debt is Important Assume a software product that solves a problem that a self-referential group of people (a market segment) is willing to pay for that product. Assume that the product has just enough features (m) that results in more customers (n), consumer retention (r) and market penetration (p) that all feed directly into the recovery time of an investment (I). These variables are at the core of[…]
Category: Technology
A strategy is a set of choices that, when combined, cause a sustainable competitive advantage. Conscious, reinforcing, choices, are powerful. That’s what you learned in B-school. I’m far more pessimistic that strategic choices are generally conscious. I’ll explain. A set of deliberate choices, that constitute a strategy, might be: Because we chose the same aircraft we save money on maintenance. Because we chose the same aircraft we save money on ticketing. Because we chose the same aircraft we compete exceptionally well on specific flight pairs. Because we chose a large set of direct point-to-point flights without going through hubs, we save money on baggage transfer. Because we simplify baggage, we can turn planes around more reliably. Because we turn planes around[…]
It’s the results, genius! It’s the results. The purpose of any sort of data analytics or data science is to get results. It isn’t about the spreadsheet that comes three weeks after the campaign. It isn’t about sandbagging numbers. It isn’t the few slides in the Quarterly Business Review. It isn’t even data entertainment. It’s the results. Great! So what’s the deal? Why is so much time expended on activities that don’t directly tie to getting results? Analytics Maturity It’s because of maturity, or the sum of experiences that an organization/culture chooses to remember. Very good models of analytics maturity exist. Stephane Hamel has a great one. Stances inform tools and tools cause experiences. Where you stand affects which, if[…]
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[…]