When I started writing on this blog 150 days ago I set up a few rules.
I think that last thing stuck with me. Its like when you learn a new trade. Then you just need to do it.
Often. Bad. Committed.
Vision is all about having a shared vocabulary with the peers you want to collaborate with.
Our lives will be less about sorting, grouping and filtering.
And more about adding missing context, asking insightful questions and making weird connections.
We know how to ask questions. It’s part of our DNA.
Then we built bots where we needed to learn brevity. We distilled our thoughts into SEO-type queries for Google and simple commands for phone robots.
Now we need to relearn how to ask questions again. We’re in a paradigm shift. With GenAI, we can ask complicated questions and as many as we want. Yet, we still try to make our questions short out of habit.
This reframing won’t be an issue for people growing up with GenAI. Kids will never experience the complicated part of distilling questions into search terms.
There is an eerie and almost exciting feeling from business people regarding vibe-coding. Like Alexander the Great, they’ve found a way of breaking the gordian knot of talking to developers that have questions.
Programmers naturally ask follow-up questions that stakeholders often don’t have immediate answers to. We need to anticipate what’s coming next to build systems that can scale.
Business people are focused on solving their current problems, while programmers are considering edge cases, future requirements, and technical challenges that aren’t obvious from the surface.
We could improve at communicating why this matters. The key is helping business see the value in our questions i.e. explaining how today’s overlooked edge case becomes tomorrow’s production outage or performance bottleneck.
After nearly 30 years developing software from startups to established companies, I’ve watched the same story play out repeatedly.
A young company gets some funding. Developers arrive eager to build something amazing. Then someone utters those fatal words: “We need to build for scalability.”
This is where bias and intuition clash in dangerous ways.
The intuition of experienced builders says focus on getting the product right first. Make something people want before worrying about serving millions. Get the plane in the air before optimising its fuel efficiency at 30000 feet.
The bias comes from pattern matching successful companies. “Amazon uses micro services so we should too.” “Netflix has a complex deployment pipeline so that must be the right approach.”
I witnessed this firsthand at a startup where engineers pushed to move from App Engine to Cloud Run for “reliability reasons.” We spent precious runway time refactoring infrastructure instead of improving the product people were paying for. Leadership didn’t understand the tradeoffs. The company eventually went bankrupt.
The inexperienced self-proclaimed senior developers kept insisting “This isn’t how you build for scalability.” But scalability wasn’t our problem. Finding product market fit was.
Scale is a question of when not if. The wisdom comes in recognising the right time to focus on it and be clear about this with both leadership and developers.
And never f*** up payments.
Rubber ducking, the exercise of explaining something to a rubber duck, is an easy way to get out of your own head and gain clarity by explaining your thoughts out loud.
Another excellent technique is called question burst. You explain your problem in 2 minutes and then others ask questions for 4 minutes.
Question bursts force you to create a high-level explanation quickly and then benefit from external perspectives through thoughtful questions.
When you want to change habits you need to identify the triggers. These are the seemingly small things that determine whether you take a run before breakfast or hit breakfast first.
I’m not a training junkie by any measure, but I know that if I want to exercise in the morning I need to put out my clothes the night before.
That small trigger change is all that is needed.
If you don’t know the triggers, you will not change the habits.
When acquiring new things focus on what makes your life an x.0 upgrade rather than just a 0.x improvement.
Upgrading from mobile phone version 14 to 15 might not make sense if the benefits are minuscule.
Remember that “1.0” is just branding. Look beyond the marketing to determine if something truly represents a significant upgrade for your specific needs.