Blog

“Commercial” is often used as an invective, to mean that something’s bad taste, stupid, or wrong. At least in my country. But the people that do that, tends to forget that things that sell ultimately …

Ask Bjørn Hansen sent me a link to this Entrepreneurial Deathtraps speech. Not bad to be aware of these traps. I’ve definitely seen quite a bit of them in action in various places I’ve been involved w…

Why is it that software specifications are always written so horribly? In fact, almost all technical writing is bad: Documentation, RFPs, proposals, you name it.

Sure, the really talented writers wou…

I’ve added another couple books: Gig, which I finished a couple months ago (and which is a good swimming-pool type book—you dive in every once in a while, when you get a chance and you feel like it), …

This is another one of those things that crystallized gradually, because it kept popping up in several situations over a few days.

I think the first one was in The Art of Possibility, where she catch…

A number of people have asked me for the custom code that I run on my site, on top of OpenACS.

What’s been holding me back is that it’s really custom-built. Originally, I wouldn’t code anything unles…

You know the feeling when something just happens to pop up again and again? You walk by a bookstore and notice some book. Then you see that same book at a friend’s place. And then you come across some…

I have a love/hate relationship with standards.

On the one side, my human side wants me to reject the idea that it’s about standards. It’s much more complex, about feelings, human nature, blah, blah.…

For several years, I’ve been saying that the genius of American business is that it knows how to make stupid people do something valuable, as epitomized by McDonald’s. Mostly people I’ve told it to ha…

Added a couple more book reviews: The Mythical Man-Month which I actually read about a year ago but forgot to review, and The Art of Possibility which I just finished.