How to Speak Machine by John Maeda

Author:John Maeda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

The more useful your software is, the more other systems depend on it, the scarier change is. You’re risking more than your piece of the world. You need progressive delivery, careful data migrations. Backwards compatibility: twice as many tests, and special cases in the code. You need to design the whole change.

On the other hand, a startup begins with no technical debt out of the gate—but within months can start to accumulate it too. But its overall rapid pace of progress will seem unnatural to the endup watching from farther up the river. At the startup there’s a sense of “Yes, we can!” versus “No, don’t do that!” because there’s so little at stake to lose and there’s no single “right way” that has yet taken hold. There’s nothing to improve upon, so there’s complete freedom to keep “making style” until that one potentially “in style” idea (or, in startup parlance, “product-market fit”) makes its appearance on the team’s radar. And when rendered as pure software, the opportunity to make constant, steady improvements at a Moorean speed and scale can achieve the outsized gains that companies like Silicon Valley darlings Uber, Pinterest, and Airbnb have managed to attain.

Improvements to a product can mathematically compound, just like money in the Warren Buffett rule. If we make no improvements to a product every day for a year, or 365 days, then it turns out to be:

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