For the last six and a half years, I’ve worked in a “speed wins” culture of quick iterations, speed of execution, done is better than perfect. A culture that believes that the faster you go, the more you can iterate, the closer you can curve-fit to the user’s needs. Of course, it doesn’t always work […]
Category Archives: Performance
Culture can be top down, or bottom up. The big commandments come from on high (“Speed wins!” “Done is better than perfect!” “Don’t be evil!” “Worse is better!”), and everyone scurries to figure out what they mean and how to make them happen. Eventually, a company will settle into a rhythm (hopefully sounding more like […]
The old-timers have it, of course. They started it, built it, went through hell to ship it, stepped up and created something from nothing in the midst of one disaster after another. You bet your ass they feel a part of what they created, feel like part of a special club, know with a justifiable sense […]
I was running late. I needed to get to work and was on my way out the door when I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten to make lunch. Not a big deal – I usually just slap a PB&J together – but I was already late, bundled up and mentally on my way. It was going to be […]
Every company optimizes for something. Sometimes this is an external measure – price, quality, security, customer service, etc. Sometimes it’s internal – hiring, project/risk/change management, and so on. Of course every company wants to do everything perfectly, but when you look at how they make decisions, there’s usually a central organizing theory. At TripAdvisor, the […]
I spent a couple of hours on Sunday putting together some IKEA furniture – a table, some chairs, a couple of cabinets with toy bins. My five year old son unexpectedly took an interest, my wife and two year old got in on the action, and a tedious process turned into a full family adventure. […]
When I started hiring, I used to look for the 10x programmers, the rockstars, the embarrassingly named “ninjas” (I blame you for starting the trend, Srinija). I quickly learned that these were impossible to hire – they looked exactly like every other “good” programmer, until one day you realized that they’d significantly improved performance by rearranging […]
I had a conversation with a coworker a while back, who asserted that every manager would take out his bad mood on his direct reports. This was said without rancor, challenge, or apology – it was stated as an axiomatic principle, in the same tone of voice that might convey a lack of interest in […]
I was talking with a coworker recently, who described how bad design just pisses him off. He can’t stop his brain from picking an app apart and figuring out what does and doesn’t work. Bad design offends him, as though someone had intentionally decided to seed their lawn with broken glass. The world is a complicated, busy […]
As I’ve moved into my new operations role, I’ve been continually struck by just how much everyone around me knows. They all seem like polymath geniuses, weaving together a dozen different knowledge domains to come to startlingly insightful diagnoses of intractably obscure problems. Coding a clever algorithm is all very well and good, but that doesn’t get […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 