Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Eat your own dogfood

Man.

Every once in a while I come across an example of what NOT to do that's soooo egregiously bad, I just HAVE to point it out. I don't like to do it, because next time it could be me -- the gods know *I* make enough of my own trouble and karma will get me for throwing these rocks, no doubt.

But this one is a classic teaching moment.

The Six Laws of the New Software.

His laws are


  • Single-idea

  • Collaborate

  • Disappear (this refers to interface design)

  • Simplify

  • Release

  • Comply



To read this I had to switch to a different machine that had acrobat on it because
  1. the default pdf reader on my linux machine wouldn't cope with the display

  2. this thing is 17 pages of pretty densely packed text.

  3. in a proprietary format

  4. using a menu structure to manage page turning

  5. written by (apparently) one guy



Now I appreciate that he's talking about software development. But the difference between programming computers (writing software) and programming people (writing manifestos) has a lot of parallels.

If you wanna talk the talk, then you gotta walk the walk.

End of today's lesson in what NOT to do.

Oye.

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