Matt Linderman of 37signals posted this today about the essence of refactoring:

“Whether we’re authoring software or prose, rewriting is key. Rewriting is when you turn good into great. It’s true for books, blog posts, marketing copy, interfaces, code, etc. For all of them, we grind it out. We get something down, share it, get feedback, revise, and then do it over again. We get where we’re going via lots of wrong turns.

Sometimes we even throw everything away and start over from scratch. Yeah, that can be frustrating. But if you never throw anything away, you’re holding on to your worst ideas.”

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the post and I highly recommend reading it over, if for nothing else than the list of quotes they have compiled. Here’s one:

“The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn’t write.”

Now I just gotta start revising and rewriting posts to this site and to Alt Text.

In some news that ties in closely with some recent discussions I have been a part of, CNN Money has an article* about wading into starting a business rather than jumping in.

* Ok lets call it an article stub - as it seems most CNN Money articles are these days.

Presumably, you want to give Agile a shot and are tossing around which principles to implement first. The number one thing I recommend going all out on from the beginning is having an on-site customer. And I don’t mean a customer advocate, or a business analyst, or some manager playing the role of a customer. I mean an actual - physical - real-life - money’s-on-the-line - stakeholder - customer. This single change to your process will completely revamp the way the team communicates. And ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, a development process is all about communication. Traditional heavyweight processes focus on capturing team communication in artifacts so people can refer back to what was said at a later date. This is flawed because it just adds more middle-men to the equation. And just like everything else in life, the fewer the middle-men the cheaper the product. The real emphasis should be on actual team communication, rather than captured team communication.

Often times I think of ideas for books I would like to write but think that I would first write a white paper on the topic to flush out my ideas. Most of the time, however, I write a blog post about the idea and never quite move on to those, more formal, stages. But there is something to this progression that seems very agile. If I made a conscious effort to push through these stages more quickly, getting feedback and having discussions along the way, I may just realize one of my life goals: to write a book.

Jason Fried had a nice post the other day about the true cost of meetings. Many people think that a one hour meeting is just that, a one hour meeting, but they are completely ignoring the fact that a one hour meeting is actually one hour times however many people you invited to come to the meeting. When you take the true cost into account, it’s easier to decide if having the meeting is truly necessary. A very plausible example would be a one hour meeting for 5 developers who make $50-100 an hour; that ends up costing the company $250-500. It would only take a few of these five-hour meetings per week to start hurting the bottom line.