6 Comments

Really looking forward to read your thoughts on all these topics. I notice a clear link to Lean concepts and systems design/theory. It would be great to understand your thought about quality (attributes) as well. In XP explained it was only one page ;-)

Expand full comment

Can you expand on #3?

Expand full comment

I intend to expand on all of them🤪 It's a huge topic but absolutely fundamental to my understanding of design. How I'm going to pack it all into one chapter I don't know. It's a book on its own.

Expand full comment

Well... do that one first ;)

Expand full comment

Your opinion of outlines reminded me of a story Alan Cooper told (over drinks after a PS SIGCHI meeting at which he spoke). I was so fortunate to hear this. It's been with me for 15+ years.

I don't remember whether Alan was referring to "About Face" or "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", but he was sharing the frustration and blockage at getting past a certain point in the early writing. He had been steeping in the problem for a long time when he had the opportunity to share it with a very close friend. He still remembers the night out on the deck over a glass of wine.

The conversation went something like this.

Alan: I'm frustrated. I have a lot of great ideas, but I don't know how to get them out of my head in a form that other people can understand. I don't understand how authors do it.

[ His friend paused to assure Alan that he heard and felt the frustration, then briefly continued...]

Alan's friend: "They're called 'chapters'".

[ Listening carefully, what I heard was the sound of "Aha!" ]

The book had already been completed, but as Alan remembered hearing "They're called chapters", I could feel the tension release from his voice and body. It was a lot of work, but from that moment forward, he said "the book just flowed out of me".

Pain is inevitable.

Suffering is optional.

-- Variously attributed to Dali Lama, Haruki Murakami, and M. Kathleen Casey

PS SIGCHI ::==

Puget Sound

SIG on Computer Human Interaction

See https://sigchi.org/ and https://www.pssigchi.org/

Expand full comment

"I learned the material here over the course of 50 years of programming", love this and thanks that you make such an effort to share it and even more to explain it. Wish you to recover soon from the annoying post covid symptoms (taking vitamins and particularly vitamin b12 helped me a lot)

Expand full comment