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Diseconomies Of Scale
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  • So Many great quotes in this.
  • "How is it that we’ve found ways to organize the work around so many other creative disciplines but writing software is still hard"
  • "Agile software development doesn’t have an explicit metaphor, apart from it being a bunch of people essentially "
  • "The film business, both a high degree of creativity but also a lot of specialization. They also had a couple more decades to figure it all out." <- They also baked top-down-ness, "creative genius" and coerce over convince into their cullture. Software culture is 10x more democratic.
  • "As soon as you start to involve more than one person, you can either try to have them all work on the same mental representation (like in pair programming), or you need to introduce some restrictions on the area of responsibility, so that everyone can mind their own business, or at least work more independently."
  • "whenever you need to design a system against many constraints, things get exponentially easier if you take problems one piece at a time" <- I need to read more Christopher Alexander.
  • "The problem is that by breaking down problems into parts, you severely restrict the solution space. If you do it wrong, the right solution depends on two different part doing something that may not make sense if looked at in an isolated fashion."
  • "Agile software development proposed: write the simplest thing that will work, and then refactor (that means cleanup) you code base constantly."
  • "What if software were built in the same way we built cities? What if the core parts of our business would be like streets, and all that newfangled stuff is something we could build on top, experiment, tear it down if it does not work"
  • "Some of these pieces of infrastructure change very slowly (like roads), while others are much more flexible, like the way apartments or shops are used." <- Love this. One thing that prevents us from doing this software is the arbitrary way in which we can expose "parts" of codebases. Git/github makes it next to impossible to say "x person/team owns this and can modify it", unless "this" is one single folder within which files are stored.
  • "if we built our cities the way we build our software, you would need to enter the shop through the special garage, and exit through the roof to walk a wire to get to another custom made building from scrapped containers to do the checkout"
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