Think, before you ask.

We encounter questions more than answer and we would love to get the questions offload from our ship as soon as possible.

So we either do it ourselves, or ask others to do that for you, partially or in whole. And since we have so much to achieve and thus, a natural tendency is to ask the help from others.

The intent itself is fine but think about the last question you have asked. Is it along the line of "Something doesn't work" or "The app is so slow".

The question I am being asked most by the developer is, "Ronnie, I clicked the link bit it doesn't work". The second runner-up is, "The site is slow, why is it?"

These are very open ended question and lots of possibilities. But one thing in common is how one (or I) can start investigating it on - log reading. But people are just lazy and would rather get an answer straight from someone, instead of figuring it out themselves.

They can get the answer quick, but traded off from learning. Every single incident is a chance to learn, you pass it over to someone (or me) just meant giving up the opportunity to learn. You forgot what you've been told very easily but remember life long if you worked this out yourself. So next time, think before you ask.

Beauty of simple

Spent 3 nights at a machiya in Kyoto. One thing that strike me the most is they way they layout the space. It isn't spacious but still, significant amount of spaces are reserved for things like, a small zen garden, a square in the living room for displaying art piece.

In Hong Kong, those will be blocked as a cupboard or something for storage.

But this demonstrate how the two races value against beauty, or arts, into their life. For Japanese, I can see the beauty is indeed a necessity, which they will put it into practice in the meal they serve, the way they dress, all things that happened in daily life. They would given up, space for example, for embracing the arts into their life.

Now, I am practicing the idea of having less but embracing the remains, embracing the room we granted for ourselves.

Why do estimation always wrong?

It's been asked by every boss or project manager. Everyone got their own version but mine is always like,

- too religious towards the end date
- over estimate the efficiency
- a tendency to accept excessive risks

When a new project started, the first thing being asked (or told) is, "When could it complete?'" or "We must finish by bla bla bla.".

In the first scenario, even though the end date is not pre-defined but the project owner usually already got something in mind. Thus, the end date looks flexible but not really that flexible. Whenever the team comes back with a date later then his desire, the usual and only response is "Finding more people to do it"!

Instead of spending time to discuss on what the risk are, "solutions" are being put forward right away. The outcome? Pitfall is being skimmed through.

Another common management principal is, parallelism. Can we work in parallel? Could a task breaks further down? It could work, but only if the team is well balanced. When the project demands a particular skillset which only a single entity can fulfill, asking him to context switch and leverage the resources will not shorten the development time. Also, there's an overhead on communication, which if not managed properly, can result in tasks undone.

When we do estimation, we are always ignoring the fact that we are not as efficient as we want to be. Able to spend 70% on the project is already very efficient. Take myself as an example, I am spending 50% of my time helping to team to resolve projects issues, 20% on daily matters (like development and operation daily issues). But I am still assigning tasks to myself which leaves out to at most 30% of my available time.

Are there solutions? There is, but takes time to practice, which I am still working hard on.

Be persistent. Don't give it up or rush out for a decisoin even when we are pressed. There are not as many "life-or-death" issues. When we need to labor a baby, there's no short cut but 9 months of pregnancy.

Be realistic. If we can only afford 30% of work hours, stick with that. Don't try to fool yourself, or your project manager that the week after will be better.

I don't know about you but to me, family and health is more important than work. Save your late night and weekend, you've got a life project to fulfill which don't stand a second chance.

Short coming as feature

I visited Kyoto lately and during my research for my trip, I learnt about Kailado, who specialized in making container for tea leaf from copper, brass and stainless steel.

It required some skillful hand to make those perfectly shaped, air tight container but one "feature" they highlight is, the container will change in color over time.

The change in color is due to the material getting anodized, in layman term, it gets rusted.

Some will treat this as a short coming but it is indeed packaged as a feature, where each identical item will become different, with our own personality. Thinking further, it is a natural occurrence. Instead of getting rid of it, we embrace it.

But how does this translate to our technology?

System is not likely to be perfect, but the main function should be very well polished and user will find their way in using it.

Burn out

"Can you try getting this to work? The biz user need this for bla bla bla"

"I know it is a last minute thing but we definitely need to have this in the next day"

Sounds familiar? Each of this stands a business value for sure (assuming they are making sensible judgement) but the fulfillment for each of this means "something" is taken away from your team.

If you have some gaming experience, you should be familiar with the magical skill, or that fatal stunt attack. They are powerful but also in limited quantity.

The "something" I refer to in the earlier paragraph works in the same way. We do the stunt and penalized a bit. When we are doing it repeatedly, we burnt out. And the sad thing is, it is very difficult to get recovered.

Unlike the fantasy world, where portions in different color could help to regain the magical point. In reality, we need both time and courages to recover. We need plenty of time to rest, to rebuild the interest in the project and to plan out the to-do. We need courages since the deliverable we are going to deal with is very likely to be broken - another penalty in doing last minute stunt.

What makes it even more difficult is, both ingredients needed are usually taken away to fire fight the instability of the system.

So your best bet is to try finding some additional resource, to start off from scratch or to find a pair of new legs to do the job.