System Ideas That Sound GoodSteven Sinofsky had a post piling on to a tweet from Martin Casado on “system ideas that sound good but almost never work”. Steven had a…Dec 30, 202432Dec 30, 202432
Published inDave’s RedistrictingCustom Datasets in DRA 2020DRA 2020 now supports taking existing datasets, available as shapefiles, GeoJSON files or CSV files, and importing them. These datasets can…Jul 17, 202411Jul 17, 202411
The Inflationary Theory of Software SystemsI love making very stretched analogies between fascinating scientific ideas and software development. Here goes another one.Jun 3, 202419Jun 3, 202419
The Appearance of CompetenceI first wrote an internal version of this blog post when managing the Microsoft Office development team and I recently had two people tell…Nov 17, 2023381Nov 17, 2023381
Incrementalism Isn’t So BadWhile incrementalism has a bad rap if you’re trying to revolutionize an industry, it’s an important characteristic if you’re trying to…Jun 14, 20237Jun 14, 20237
What Really Happened With Office and Windows 8I was looking forward to reading the discussion of Office and Windows 8 in Steven Sinofsky’s “Hardcore Software” substack, but was pretty…Nov 16, 20221452Nov 16, 20221452
Published inDave’s RedistrictingRacial Dot Map in DRA2020DRA2020 now provides the ability to overlay a “racial dot map” on your map as you draw or view your map.Oct 12, 202219Oct 12, 202219
Time to Bury This Old Stale Project Management TrilemmaI saw another tweet recently about this tired old triangle of project management. Really the whole framing is nonsense and should be buried…Oct 3, 2022343Oct 3, 2022343
Surprising AutomataI took the opportunity of a recent mild case of Covid with attendant quarantine episode to finally work my way through Stephen Wolfram’s…Sep 7, 20221Sep 7, 20221
What Color is Your Function? You Better Know!I never got around to commenting on this somewhat notorious post What Color is Your Function, by Bob Nystrom. This was from 2015 so I feel…May 19, 20221May 19, 20221
Ben Thompson interviews Shishir Mehrotra of Coda — I have ThoughtsBen Thompson had a great interview (paywall) with Shishir Mehrotra, former VP of YouTube and current CEO at Coda. It touched on a bunch of…May 16, 2022May 16, 2022
Where Does Bloat Come From?Steven Sinofsky has another deeply researched post about the history of UI complexity and bloat in the Microsoft Office applications. His…Apr 29, 20222Apr 29, 20222
Anatomy of a Moderately Complex AppWhere I go on and on about what I’ve been doing for the last 3 yearsJan 13, 20223Jan 13, 20223
Yuck, Office HTMLSteven Sinofsky’s recent blog post on the strategic background behind Office’s HTML support in Office9 (branded as “Office 2000” and…Dec 8, 20212Dec 8, 20212
Small Pleasures of ProgrammingOne of the little secrets of computer programming is that it is actually quite a bit of fun. You discover little intellectual puzzles to…Dec 14, 20202Dec 14, 20202
Insights from the Physical Reality of ComputingI have been trying for a while to come up with a way of organizing the most critical insights and intuitions I end up using when I…Nov 12, 20201Nov 12, 20201
Yikes, They Rewrote Evernote?I couldn’t resist commenting on this interview with Evernote’s CEO about the project to rewrite Evernote.Sep 17, 20204Sep 17, 20204
Published inThe StartupThe 10th Anniversary of the iPad — a Perspective From OfficeThere have been a number of interesting and thoughtful retrospectives on the 10th anniversary of the iPad’s announcement. Steven Sinofsky…Mar 6, 20201Mar 6, 20201