Technical Difficulties from on Top of the Mountain

2018-11-22

The beauty of the proper design

After decades in the software engineering business, one can't read classic texts without getting mad. Not because they were wrong, but because they were right, and nobody seems to have been listening. This particular part about top level design from Mythical Man Month resonates with me dearly:

The process of step-wise refinement does not mean that one never has to go back, scrap the top level, and start the whole thing again as one encounters some unexpectedly knotty detail. Indeed, that happens often. But it is much easier to see exactly when and why one should throw away a gross design and start over. Many poor systems come from an attempt to salvage a bad basic design and patch it with all kinds of superficial relief.

Many a startup I worked on brought me in do just that kind of superficial patching. At first I would present the need for deeper change to management, once I understood where the design had gone wrong. Later I learned to avoid this waste of time, and occasionally succeeded in making the needed changes before the higher ups caught on.

Labels: engineering, mythical man month

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2007-04-27

a few ways to make Twitter better

I was asked recently, how would you make Twitter better. My first answer was just to make it work, as it has performance/scaling issues at the moment. But that's not a very satisfying answer to someone who's not an infrastructure mechanic. So, putting my user hat back on now that the week's pressures have flowed past, here's a list of things you might do to make twitter better:

edit/delete old posts
secret email gateway address for posting to
multiple secret addresses so I can revoke one and not another
random message feed : 1 per day, (or variable frequencies)
see what friends of friends are saying (perhaps in a much smaller font)
ability to nudge friends of friends
get friends to vouch for me to their friends
group friends
set limits on updates wanted per friend or per group of friend
more complex routing rules
multiple IM accounts, multiple sms #s
spell checker
mobile friendly page (lighter on javascript & images)
search on usernames
search on user web addresses
search on message text (who's talking about TIG)

Well, lets start there and see what else I can think of.

Labels: engineering, twitter

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