Theres a popular notion that artists work from inspiration - that there’s some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope (my work) makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a >terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice i can afford to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. Mason Currey.
However, the real productivity killer is not system rewrites but the migrations that follow those rewrites. Poorly designed migrations expand the consequences of this rewrite loop from the individual teams supporting the systems to the entire surrounding organization. If each migration takes a week, each team is eight engineers, and you’re doing four migrations a year, then you’re losing about 1 percent of your company’s total productivity. If each of those migrations takes closer to a month, or if they are only possible for your small cadre of trained engineers—whose time is already tightly contended for—then the impact becomes far more pronounced....
Absolutely great article by Seth Godin on hardware/software perspectives. Looking at the giants, like Apple. Here are some of points from the article: Software can change faster than hardware, which means that in changing markets, bet on software. * It’s tempting to treat the user interface as a piece of fashion, some bling, a sort of jewelry. It’s not. It’s the way your user controls the tool you build. Change it when it stops working, not when you’re bored with it....