Rob Grady » Business

Technical Debt

Rob — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:38:54 +0000

Here are excerpts from this article that discusses two types of technical debt

“The first kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred unintentionally. For example, a design approach just turns out to be error-prone or a junior programmer just writes bad code. This technical debt is the non-strategic result of doing a poor job. In some cases, this kind of debt can be incurred unknowingly, for example, your company might acquire a company that has accumulated significant technical debt that you don’t identify until after the acquisition. Sometimes, ironically, this debt can be created when a team stumbles in its efforts to rewrite a debt-laden platform and inadvertently creates more debt. We’ll call this general category of debt Type I.

The second kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred intentionally. This commonly occurs when an organization makes a conscious decision to optimize for the present rather than for the future. “If we don’t get this release done on time, there won’t be a next release” is a common refrain—and often a compelling one. This leads to decisions like, “We don’t have time to reconcile these two databases, so we’ll write some glue code that keeps them synchronized for now and reconcile them after we ship.” Or “We have some code written by a contractor that doesn’t follow our coding standards; we’ll clean that up later.” Or “We didn’t have time to write all the unit tests for the code we wrote the last 2 months of the project. We’ll right those tests after the release.” (We’ll call this Type II.)”

Inc Magazine article on ‘Lean Product Development’

Rob — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:44:46 +0000

Inc Magazine has an article on ‘Lean Product Development’, an emerging business philosophy that has recently gained a lot of momentum. Applying lean concepts to product management is the latest in the application of lean manufacturing to software development over the last few years.

While a Lean Product Development, evangelized by Eric Ries and Steve Blank, appears to be the latest business fad it has several key concepts that apply to any business. The Minimal Viable Product and Steve Blank’s Customer Development concepts are really common sense elements that many organization’s, large and small, ignore. Definitely check it out.

Great Quote from Steve Blank

Rob — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:32:34 +0000

Great quote from Steve Blank “Startups were not just smaller versions of a large company, they were about invention, innovation and iteration - of business model, product, customers and on and on. Startups were doing discovery of the problem and solution in real-time.”

Make it the present tense and that’s what we do daily.

Video: What Jeff Bezos Knows

Rob — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:10:51 +0000

5 Interesting Things

Rob — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:47:06 +0000

Interesting starter article “15 Roles Every Startup Needs” makes you take inventory on what ya got and what you need
Collection of screen shots of major os interface design between 1981-2009 (via @andrew_chen)
How White Am I,
“How to build companies that matter” @ericries on O’Reilly Radar
Quote: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” JK Galbraith via @NYTimes Weeek (via @timoreilly)

Acadamic Quote from “Business Dynamics”

Rob — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:51:45 +0000

“People have a strong tendency to attribute the behavior of others to dispositional rather than situational factors, that is, tribute the behavior of others to character and especially character flaws rather than the system in which these people are acting.”

Good business reality check

Rob — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:23:06 +0000

Great post: When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs

Quote: Implementing Lean Software Development

Rob — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:51:40 +0000

From Implementing Lean Software Development, “Development is the process of transforming ideas into products. There are two schools of thought about how to go about this transformation. We might call one the deterministic school of thought and the second the empirical school of thought. The deterministic school starts by creating a complete product definition, and then creates a realization of that definition. The empirical school starts with a high-level concept and then establishes a well-defined feedback loop that adjusts activities so as to create an optimal interpretation of the concept.”

What school of thought does your organization follow?

Giving City Magazine

Rob — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:10:32 +0000

Check out the latest issue of Giving City Magazine. It is a great example of a talented start-up team making the most of the PDF as a magazine format. Two very talented people Monica Maldonado Williams and Torquil Dewar have put together a great magazine around philanthropy and community participation. Check it out here.

Facscinating paper: Spamalytics: An Emperical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion

Rob — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:02:29 +0000

Thanks to High Scalability for publicizing a very cool paper on Spamalytics.

The paper Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion is a fascinating (academic) read about spam conversion. I’ve always assumed that spamming must be profitable at least for the anti-spam industry. This paper not only outlines the underlying economics but the Storm Netbot spam system as well. In fact these guys actually hacked the spam system to carry out their experiments.

Highlights:

It took 12.5 million emails to generate 1 sale
After 26 days the botnet had sent out over 350 million emails and 28 generate a transaction
Extrapolating the figures, they believe the network generated $3.5 million a year in revenue
Researchers gained control of 75,869 hijacked computers
One in 10 people clicked on links that normally download malware to turn their computer into a bot
Between 3500 and 8500 bots are created daily