The Sherpa Project

About a week ago I purchased the Getting Real book from 37signals. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this book to come out for a while now and I can say that it was well worth the wait. The book (available only as a pdf) is entertaining and very thought provoking. I can say that I agree with almost every one of the statements and sections in the book.

The biggest value for me in the reading of the book was the ability to be exposed to ideas for design as well as development. My primary activities mostly center around development on a day-to-day basis, but the insight into the design ideas in the book were a big eye-opener for me. I’ve preached most of the development-centric practices that are outlined in the book and it was nice to view the logic behind each of the sections in the book. The book also contains many good quotes that are provided from a diverse set of individuals.
I would recommend this book to anyone and promise that it will be well worth your $19.

My wife just received her real estate license and one of the initial things she had to do was to decide on a business card. As part of this process, we started to look around at different sites and examples of typical real estate business cards. I can honestly say that I didn’t find even one example that I thought was designed well.

Why is it that so many business cards suck? This isn’t just in real estate, it’s everywhere.

We finally came up with a design, but it’s nothing close to any of the ideas that we found online or the examples that she was given.

One business card of note (the one that provided the inspiration to design a card that doesn’t suck) can be seen in the “Down with Titles” post by Garrett Dimon. I love the fact that the card is simple, informative, and memorable. The accompanying presentation for the design of the business card can be found here (pdf).

I just received an invite to Newsvine and I can’t get over how nicely designed the site is. The usability of the site is incredible and they have done a wonderful job of making the site “feel” good.

It’s been wonderful seeing an intense focus on design lately from many of the new companies and products that are being released. Hopefully this keeps up.

This might just be my dream retreat

I used to love writing documentation. I was a little different than the average developer I guess. I felt like the more I wrote, the better the documentation was. The height of my excitement was writing a 150+ page functional specification for a product I was doing the architecture and requirements gathering for. I loved sending those huge emails with my document attached. I loved hogging the printer for an hour before a meeting printing out copies for everyone. In short - I guess I just felt like I worked really hard, used words that were hard for others to understand, and had the coolest Visio diagrams. For some reason I really enjoyed that.

I was an idiot.

No one ever read that document and the document was mostly out of date when I was required to “freeze” it. What a waste. Thinking back on it, it would have been a waste if it was half the size. It would have probably been a waste if it was 1/10th of the size.

I decided to completely shun documentation after I realized how much time I wasted (both mine and co-workers) on that document. For a long time I avoided writing documentation at all costs. The great thing about looking for work-arounds from writing documentation was that I found a whole world of great tools that can generate documentation and remove the repetition out of much of the useless documentation that most development shops require.

Like it or not, there are many times that documentation is needed (although a good conversation can replace most of what we normally document).

I recently started a project and took the Agile Modeling approach by Scott Ambler. I can finally say that I’ve found a great middle of the road approach to documentation and modeling. I’ve started giving in and writing documentation (when it’s justified) and I feel like I am producing documents that are valuable.

It’s amazing how readable and useful a document can be when you cut out all the useless shit and put in the stuff that really matters.