What's cooking

I've been trying to catch up with long overdue reading, having received some great tips from Chris Spagnuolo and Ben Carey - both great colleagues in the Rally

Services team. I started "Tribes" by Seth Godin, and although it reads like its written by a person who was writing two blogs and three articles at the same time as the book - besides cooking dinner for his family - it is an inspiring little book. Without the book you wouldn't find me on Twitter or Facebook, and this website wouldn't be here. Comes recommended.

What is also an interesting read is "Building the Empire State" by Carol Willis, a reprint of the 1930s notebook of the builders of the Empire State Building. Tom and Mary Poppendieck brought it to my attention, and it is interesting to read how the then largest building got erected in less then a year. It helps when teaching software architects that you don't need a big upfront design for a complicated project. What one does need is a good understanding of the trade-offs of the important limiting factors for the new product. Interestingly enough the building variables (like amount of steel and concrete) weren't the most important factors for the Empire State, it was traffic - having a truck arrive every minute on-site, and not being able to store the goods anywhere. The architects solved this problem by designing a new set of transportation solution on the building site, thus avoiding the need to store materials. These trade-offs, caught in an A3 (see elsewhere on the site) are an interesting topic for study in our software development world.