Yesterday, I attended the Czech Executive meetup in Brno, which was held in a WWII-era bunker. As the communists had a top-secret base there, I thought creating a little old-school digital business card to share at the networking event might be fun. I generated the code with Claude, uploaded it to GitHub pages, and programmed an NFC tag with the URL so that you can just tap it with your phone. A hacking game in the middle "protects" the links to my website. Eat the red packet, and you're...
1 day ago • 1 min read
Find out how much <the thing you want to do> is worth. This can help in two ways. If it’s internal it helps you to prioritize and focus on doing the most impactful things. If it’s for a client it helps you set a price as a fraction of that value. That’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. Problem is people don’t even try. Here’s what you can do. Break it down into spefic measurable outcomes like increased sales, time saved or reduced costs. Then assign a reasonable estimate to each. Like 10%...
2 days ago • 1 min read
When it comes to software development, there are two things that you shouldn't mix up. Doing things right This is how fast and efficient you are at making improvements. You track DORA metrics like the time it takes from a successful commit to deployed code, deployment frequency (daily vs weekly), change fail percentage, and the time it takes to recover from a failure. This is all optimizing the development process to get to good faster. But if you work on the wrong things, you're just adding...
3 days ago • 1 min read
SpaceX just caught their booster using oversized chopsticks and there's a lesson there we can apply. 🥢🚀 When we compare the build process for Space Launch System to Starship, it's like waterfall vs agile. The NASA approach is to gather requirements, have a long planning phase, build components for many years, assemble the rocket, test some more, and finally launch with fingers crossed. It's often late, over budget, and conservative in execution. The SpaceX approach is optimized for learning....
4 days ago • 1 min read
Let's say you have a concept for a new product you want to validate. Can you do it without code? Perfect. No? Take as much off the shelf as you possibly can and custom-build just the thing you want to test. Don't start with the software architecture, microservices, and a registration and login system only to find out that after two months of work, you've built just the skeleton. Remember, the goal is to get to good faster. How much are you going to learn by building your sixth version of a...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Imagine a 4-hour scrum planning meeting where you talk, discuss stories, estimate points, drag things into the sprint, and quietly question your life choices. I've done my fair share of those. It's not fun. But there are three things you can do to never have a boring planning meeting again. 1 — Groom the backlog ahead of time Having 400 items in the backlog is not a goldmine where profit will be made once you eventually reach the ones on the bottom. The truth is that old stories are less than...
6 days ago • 1 min read
I've been thinking about my solopreneur journey and some lessons I've learned. Here's three 👇🏻 Lesson 1: Being good at something is a prerequisite, not a feature. It's step zero. It doesn't generate sales; it just enables you to build on top. But you still need to find your target audience, what problem you will solve for them, how you will solve it, and how much you will charge. Then you need to let them know about your offer. Do marketing. And if you've done all that, congrats, now you are...
7 days ago • 1 min read
I've written about the importance of quantifying how tech initiatives contribute to business goals. Understanding exactly how a piece of software improves the outcomes we want is very valuable. It is easy to measure a website's load time, uptime percentage, cart abandonment, and conversion from registration to payment. But if you focus only on working on things you can quantifiably improve, you'll likely leave too much on the table. How much does having great dev support that resolves...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Compared to construction, where requirements are more often well-defined upfront, software is more ... fluid. You don't know what the customers want.You don't know what product to build for them.You don't know what software architecture is best. But as time goes on and we keep building, we'll learn these things. That's why before a project starts, it's anyone's guess how long it will take. But once you've been working on it for a while, things tend to get more well-defined. You choose a...
9 days ago • 1 min read