About happiness

 "Happiness is simply the absence of desire... Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state."

"He who angers you, conquers you." Source: Sister Kenny​

 Ärgere dich über nichts. Vergebe Liebesmühe. Damit gibts du jemandem noch mehr von dir als ohnehin schon. Checke was du tun kannst, und das ist alles.

Overhead on collaboration

Haile’s first law of media

The success of any project is inversely correlated with the amount that requires publishers to work together.

Finite vs infinite games and how you need to play them very differently

 A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. 

Debate is a finite game. 

Marriage is an infinite game. 

The midterm elections are finite games. 

American democracy is an infinite game. 

A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference. A bad fight can destroy a marriage. A challenged election can destabilize a democracy.

Dumm sein macht glücklich.

 Überheblich, ich weiß, aber dennoch lustig.

For headhunters: "Warum ist die Stelle frei?" als wichtigste Frage

The Mythical man-month - Frederick P. Brooks jr.

• Efforts
• standalone program *3 to develop program that works on any system
• standalone program *3 to develop program to programming product which works with other programs
• standalone program *9 to develop program that works on all systems together with other programs
• Only this is a truly useful project
• Why is programming fun?
• Sheer joy of making things
• useful to other people
• we want others to use our work and find it helpful
• fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work
• Joy of always learning
• The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff by exertion of the imagination
• Woes of programming
• One must perform perfectly
• other people set one's objective
• One rarely controls the circumstances of his work or even its goal.
• One's authority is not sufficient for his reponsibility
• (Here agile tries to bring responsibility and authority together)
• Designing grand concepts is fun; finding nitty little bugs is just work
• debugging has a linear convergence, the last difficult bugs taking more time to find than the first
• the technological base on which one builds is always advancing
• as soon as one freezes a design, it becomes obsolete
• implementation of real products demands phasing and quantizing. The obsolescene of an implementatino must be measured against other existing implementations, NOT against unrealized concepts
• (excecution is what counts)
• (better done than perfect)
• Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you
• More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined
• All programmers are optimists
• Perhapts the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal.
• So the first false assumption that underlies the scheduling of systems programming is that ALL WILL GO WELL, i.e. that EACH TASK WILL ONLY TAKE AS LONG AS IT "OUGHT" TO TAKE
• A large programming effort, however, consists of many tasks, some chained end-to-end. The probability that each will go well becomes vanishingly small
• Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with NO communication among them
• The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned
• Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging
• the effort of communication must be added to the amount of work to be done.
• The added burdon of communication is made up of two parts: training and intercommunication
• Each worker must be trained
• Intercommunicatino is worse - efforts increases as n(n-1)/2
• It quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time.
• Adding more people then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.
• Therefore, testing is usually the most mis-scheduled part of programming
• 1/3 planning + 1/6 coding + 1/4 component test and early system test + 1/4 system test, all components at hand 
• 33% plan, 17% build, 50% test
• no one is aware of schedule trouble until almost the delivery date.
• delay at this point has unusually severy financial, as well as psychological, repercussions
• An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices . wait or eat it raw. Software customers have the same choices.
• What does one do when an essential software project is behind schedule? Add manpower naturally
• Or trim the task
• BROOKS LAW: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
• (therefore decompose tasks, small scopes - agile delivery = usable increments)
• Wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones
• 10:1
• The data showed no correlation whatsoever between experience and performance
• small, sharp teams max 10 people (this is exactly scrum team size)
• Most European cathedrals show differences in plan or architectural style between parts build in different generations by different builders. The later builders were tempted to "improve" upon the designs of the earlier ones, to reflect both changes in fashion and differences in individual taste. 
• Against these, the architectural unity of Reims stands in glorious contract. This integrity was achieved by the self-abnegation of eight generations of builders, each of whom sacrificed some of his ideas so that the whole might be of pure design.
• It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.
• (Airport Berlin desaster with steadily changing scope)
• Similarly, I observe that the external provision of an architecture enhances, not cramps, the creative style of an implementing group. They focus at once on the part of the problem no one has addressed, and inventions begin to flow. In an unconstrained implementing group, most thought and debate goes into architectural decisions, and implementation proper gets short shrift.
• "We finally decided to implement the language unchanged and unimproved, for the debates about language would have taken all the effort."
• The fundamental answer is thoroughgoing, careful, and sympathetic communication between architect and builder..
• An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing.
• An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers, take one or three."
• He found his programming teams missing schedules by about one-half
• showed that the estimating error could be entirely accounted for by the fact that his teams were only realizing 50 percent of the working week as actual programming and debugging time. Machine downtime, higher-priority unrelated jobs, meetings, paperwork, company business, sickness, personal time etc accounted for the rest 
• In short, the estimates made an unrealistic assumption about the number of technical work hours per man-year.
• "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
• In most projects, the first system build is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three.
• The management question, therefore, is not WHETHER to build a pilot system and throw it away. You WILL do that. The only question is wether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.
• Hence, plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow
• Managers themselves often think of senior people as "too valuable" to use for actual programming. Next, management jobs carry higher prestige. To overcome this problem some laboratories, such as Bell Labs, abolish all job titles. Each professional employee is a "member of the technical staff"
• Managers need to be sent to technical refresher courses, senior technical people to management training. Project objectives, progress, and management problems must be shared with the whole body of senior people
• Whenever talents permit, senior peope must be kept technically and emotionally ready to manage groups or to delight in building programs with their own hands. 
• It has the effect of making a senior man feel that he does not demean himself when he builds programs, and it attempts to remove the social obstacles that deprive him of that creative joy.
• We rebuild the developing system every night [and run test cases]. The build cycle becomes the heartbeat of the project. Every day one or more of the programmer-tester teams check in modules with new functions. After every build, we have a running system.
• In particular, adding extra manpower early in the schedule is a much safer maneuver than adding it later, since the new people always have an immediate negative effect.
  

Tatort Kanban

• Stop starting, start finishing
• Fokus auf das Beenden von Aufgaben
• Wert für den Kunden im Zentrum
• Manage work, not people
• parallele Tätigkeiten limitieren
• Abhängigkeiten reduzieren
• Kanban kommt aus dem japanischen und heißt so was wie Signalkarte
• Agilität: Schnelligkeit, Anpassung, Dynamik, Selbstorganisation
• Kybernetik: Selbstorganisation ist der normale Weg. Deswegen muss Selbstorganisation als die Regel und nicht die Ausnahme systemischen Verhaltens betrachtet werden.
• work in progress limit in kanban
• In diesem Arbeitsschritt wird an maximal zehn Dingen parallel gearbeitet
• Dadurch, dass ab der Spalte Next jede Aktivitätenspalte limitiert ist, verhindern wir, dass wir mit Arbeit überschwemmt werden - was bekanntilch nicht Fluss, sondern Stau fördert.
• dass wir damit die an uns gestellten Anforderungen und unser aktuelles Leistungsvermögen möglichst gut im Gleichgewicht halten.
• Was passiert auf einer Autobahn, wenn dort zu viele Autos fahren.
• langsamer
• Genau, der Verkehrsfluss hat ein natürliches Limit.
• Es wir immer zähflüssiger, wenn noch mehr Autos auf die Autobahn strömen.
• Es geht immer langsamer bis alles steht
• Dann kommt die Polizei und löst es:
• Der Zufluss wird so geregelt wie es die Ampeln an den Auffahrten zur Autobahn tun. Gleichzeitig wir die Durchschntissgeschwindigkeit gesenkt (dynamische Anzeigen auf der Autobahn die bei starkem Verkehr auf 120/100/80 runterregeln), damit der Verkehr nicht zum Erliegen kommt
• Auch in der Produktion wird seit vielen Jahren auf bewusste Limitierung gesetzt. Nur in der Wissensarbeit werden diese einfachen Flussprinzipien immer noch weitgehend ignoriert.
• Kassasturz
• gemeinsam innezuhalten und nicht einfach so weiterzumachen, bis man nur noch kopflos agierte. 
• Zeit und Raum, um ihre Erfahrungen zu sortieren.
• erst einmal nachzudenken und Einsichten zu gewinnen
• Welchen Sinn hatte es, immer mehr Informationen zu sammeln, wenn einem der Überblick fehlte
• 
   

Rich dad, poor dad - Robert Kiyosaki

• If you learn lifes lessons, you will do well. If not, life will jsut continue to push you around.
• Life pushes all of us around. Some people give up and other fight. A few learn the lesson and move on. They welcome life pushing them around. To these few people, it meand they need an want to learn something. They learn and move on. Most quit, and a few fight.
• If you learn this lesson, you will grow in to a wise, wealthy, and happy young man. If you dont, you will spend your life blaming.
• If you think I am the problem, then you have to change me. If you realize that youre the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something, and grow wiser. Most people want everyone else in the world to change but themselves. Let me tell you, it's easier to change yourself than everyone else.
• The pattern of get up, go to work, pay bills; get up, go to work, pay bills. Peoples lives are forever controlles by two emotions: fear and greed: Offer them more mone and they continue the cycle by increasing their spending. This is what I call the Rat Race.
• A job is really a short-term solution to a long-term problem (having to pay expenses)
• Its not how much money you make. Its how much money you keep.
• The rich focus on their asset columns while everyone else focuses on their income statements.
• There is a big difference between your profession and your business. I often ask people, "What is your business?" and they will say "Oh, I am a banker." Then I ask them if they own the bank. "No, I work there.". In that instance, they have confused their profession with their business. Their profession may be a banker, but they still need their own business
• Their business is selling their labour to the bank. It doesnt scale. There is only so much time you have. Time for income, not for assets
  
•  Too many people forget to mind their own business. They spend their lives minding someones elses business and making that person rich
• Start minding your own business. Keep your daytime job, but start buying real assets, not liabilities or personal effects that have no real value once you get them home. A
• Keep expenses low, reduce liabilitites, and diligently build a base of solid assets.
• The economy was terrible at that time. For investors, this is the perfect market condition.... Because people were giving properties away I was buying.I was not saving money. I was investing.
• It says best-selling author, not best-writing.
• But a savvy investor knows that the seemingly worst of times is actually the best of times to make money. When everyone else is too afraid to act, they pull the trigger and are rewarded.
• A friend of mine recently had her apartment burglarized. The thieves took her leectronics and left all the books. And we all have that same choice. 90% of the population buys TV sets, and only about 10% buy business books.
• This is because, in the market, it is usually the crowd that shows up late that is slaughtered. If a great deal is on the frnot page, its too late in most instances. Look for a new deal.
• This is hard for most investors because buying what is not popular is frightening.
• Money is only an idea. If you want more money, simply change your thinking.
  

"Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes "Do bats eat cats?" for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

 

"Zeit hat man nicht, Zeit nimmt man sich."

 

Your mind is good in having ideas, not in holding them. - David Allen

 

There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.

 

Amateure kümmern sich um Strategie, Profis um Logistik.

If you don’t do the business the business will do you (From Elvis movie)

"A book??? I already have a book!" :-) :-) :-)

Nightfall - Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg

 Of course it is. But Athor reminded me of the old philosophical chestnut of Thargola's Sword. Which we use - methaphorically, I mean - to smite the more complex premise, when we're trying to decide between two hypotneses. It's simpler to go looking for a dark sun than it is to have to produce an entirely new Theory of Universal Gravitation.

The stock market has crashed three separate times, or haven't you noticed? Sensible investors dont really believe the world is coming to an end, but they think other investors might start to think so, and so the smart ones sell out before the panic begins - thus touching off the panic themselves. And then they buy back afterward, and sell again as soon as the market rallies, and begin the whole downward cycle all over again.

no amount of smooth talk was persuasive enough to break through barriers that were so determinently maintained. He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it ultimately to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren't so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook.

It had been a pretty good world, he thougth. Not perfect, far from it, but good enough. Most people had been reasonably happy, most were prosperous, there was progress being made on all fronts - toward deeper scientific understanding, toward greater economic expansion, toward stronger global cooperation. The concept of war had come to seem quatntly medieval and the age-old religious bigotries were mostly obsolete, or so it had seemed to him.

Ben Stancil - Making the decision is more important than the decision you make

The Art of statistics - Learning from data - David Spiegelhalter

• The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.
• PPDAC problem-solving cycle
• Problem
• Understanding and defining the proclem
• Plan
• What to measure and how?
• Data
• Collection
• Management
• Cleaning
• Analysis
• Sort, table, graphs
• pattern
• hypothesis generation
• Conclusion
• Interpretation
• conclusion
• new ideas
• communication
• None of the data sources could be considered "the truth"
• Framing
• 5% mortality sounds worse than 95% survival
• Nearly everyone has greater than the average number of legs (1.99999)
• And people have on average one testicle
• average-house price (median) vs average house-price (mean)
• We cannot conclude that the higher survival rates were in any sense caused by the increased number of cases - in fact it could even be the other way round: better hospitals simply attracted more patients
• Alberto Cairo four common features of a good data visualization
• 1) It contains reliable information
• 2) The design has been chosen so that relevant patterns become noticeable
• 3) It presented in an attractive manner, but appearance should not get in the way of honesty, clarity and depth.
• 4) When appropriate, it is organized in a way that enables some exploration
• The first rule of communication is to shut up and listen, so that you can get to know about the audience for your communication
• The second rule of communciation is to now what you want to achieve. To encourage open debate and informed decision-making. We have to acknowledge we are telling a story.
• Hans Rosling: "These facts are not up for discussion. I am right, and you are wrong"
• After someone from the royal statistical society criticized their suvey methods, a spokesman for Ryanair's boss Michael O'Leary said, "Ninety-fice per cent of Ryanair customers havent heard of the Royal Statistical Society, 97 per cent don't care what they say and 100% said it sounds like their people need to book a low-fare Ryanair holiday." 
• Runs of good or bad fortune represent a constant state of affairs, then we will wrongly attribute the reversion to normal as the consequence of any intervention we have made
• Football managers who get sacked after a string of losses, only to find their successors getting credit for the return to normal
• Active fund managers dropping in performance, after being tipped after a couple of good years
• The "Curse of Sports Illustrated" in which athletes get featured on the cover following a series of achievements, only to subsequently have their performance plummet
• A model is a map, rather than the territory itself.
• All models are wrong, some are useful
• Bootstrapping the data - the magical idea of pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps
• we do resampling from the collected data, say 1,000 times, we get 1,000 possible estimates of the mean.
• You can fit regression lines per bootstapped sample
• you get variability in gradient
• The American statistical associations 6 principles about P-values:
1. P-values can indicate how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model
2. P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone
3. Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a P-value passes a specific threshold.
4. Proper inference requires full reporting and transparency
5. A P-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.
6. By itself, a P-value does not provide a good measure of evidence regarding a model or hypothesis. For example, a P-value near 0.05 taken by itself offers only weak evidence against the null hypothesis.
• HARKing - inventing the Hyptheses after the Results are Known
  

The Unicorn Project

• After all, making developers more productive is always super important
• About a bad leader: "Last year, she had a different pitch every Town Hall, promising a totally different transformatino then what had been presented before, causing lots of confusino, organization whiplash, and eventualls ridicule.
• "You developers always make sure features take priority, and you never clean up all the technical debt you create..."
• The reason Dave is so good is that he never asks for permission!
• "This company is run by a bunch of executives with no clue about technology, and project managers who want us to follow a bunch of arcane processes. I'll scream at the next one who wants me to write a Product Requirements Document.
• Now you can prototype most features in the time it takes to even write one page of a PRD.
• It's just like the TV show Survivor, all the technology executives are just trying to last one more episode
• You've created a system where small teams of engineers are able to work productively and independently of each other, with components painstakingly and splendidly isolated from each other, instead of being complected into a giant, ugly, knotty mess. (API, microservices,...)
• It requires focus and elevation of improvement of daily work, even over daily work itself. Without this ruthless focus, every simple system degrade over time. increasingly buried under a tundra of technical debt.
• Tech giants give Dev productivitiy responsibilitities to only the most senior and experienced engineers
• Five ideals
1. Locality and simplicity. design things for locality in systems and organization. In everything we do.
2. Focus, Flow, and Joy. How our daily work feels.Work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work
3. Improvement of Daily Work. Elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself. Learning.
4. Psychological Safety. We make it safe to talk about problems because this requires prevention, which requires honesty and this requires absence of fear.
5. Customer Focus. Ruthlessly question whether something actually matters to our customers. Are they willing to pay us for it?
• Making Brent productive:
• Taken me off of every mailing list
• Turn off notifications from every chat room
• not to answer the phone for anyone
• Someone is assigned to read all emails and phone calls and yell at anyone trying to get ahold of me.
• Every tech giant has nearly been killed by technical debt
• They became to encumbered by technical debt they could no longer deliver what their customers demanded
• Business people are completely oblivious that technical debt even exists.
• All the tech giants, at some point in their history, have used the feature freeze to massively rearchitect their systems.
• Satya Nadella has a culture that if a developer ever has a choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always choose developer productivity.
• Innovation and learning occur at the edges, not the core. Problems must be solved on the frontlines, where daily work is performed by the world's foremost experts who confront those problems most often
• For the leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling, and removing obstacles.
• In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.
• Writing things down enforced a logical rigor that he thought was very important for leaders to have.
• It's been true for hundreds of years and probably thousands more: employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that mattter. If we do it right, and manage cash effectively, every other financial target will take care of itself
• The HIPPO effect (Highest paid persons opinion) - people unhealthy tendency to only care what the highest-level decision-maker thought.
• Every week we will create time for everyone in the company to learn. For two hours, everyone is expected to teach something or learn something.
• She was going to be the first distinguished engineer in the companys history, reporting directly to the CEO
• She is excited that there is finally a career ladder for individual contributors and brilliant technologists without having to become managers
• 
  

KPI goes up and right

 From Ben.substack:

Investors may look at the other benchmarks, but any chart that's sufficiently up and to the right can tell a compelling narrative, and fund a business to keep building.

=> Choose your top-level KPI wisely that can can show this up-right-movement over time.

The Queen: "Never complain, never explain."

Scholz Weisheit

 Wir sind nie beleidigt. Wir sind nie hysterisch.

The goal from Wliyahu M. Goldratt

 The Goal  from Wliyahu M. Goldratt

• productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is
• Does anyone genuinely understand what we're doing here?
• Cash-Flow: if you dont, nothing else matters. Its a measure of survival: stay above the line and youre okay, go below and youre dead
• Throughput
• Inventory
• We are always talking about the organization as a whole - not about the manufacturing department, or about one plant, or about one department within the plant. We are not concerned with local optima
• a part in the orga can be superb and super efficient - if it doesnt increase througput / output it worth nothing - you just shift backlogs and inventory
• "Just pay me the value of what you learn from me" - a consultant
• The goal is not to reduce operational expense by itself. The goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation. The goal is to reduce operational expense and reduce inventory while simultaneously increasing throughput.
• Processes fluctuate. These accumulate throughout a process. And mostly it's an accumulation of slowness
• Balance flow, not capacity
• The idea is to make the flow through the bottleneck equal to demand from the market
• The whole system can only be as fast as the throughput of the bottleneck
• "But we have a union to deal with" - "So talk to them. They have a stake in this plant. They are not stupid. But you have to make them understand"
• When you make a non-bottleneck do more work than this machine, you are not increasing productivity
• Since we cut batch sizes, work is flowing through the plant more smoothly than ever! SMALL BATCH SIZES
• Common Sense is not common at all
• Way of leading to the answers through asking questions ("Socratig approach")
• Dont give the answer, just ask the questions.
• We re-engineered the deal. We came back with a counter-offer that was feasible and that the client liked even more than his original request.
• Almost every big company is oscillating every five to ten years from centralization to decentralization, and then back again
• When you dont know what to do you can always reshuffle the cards - reorganize
• Culture change - from "cost world" to "throughput world"
• Process of ongoing improvements
• Steps:
• 1) Identify the systems bottlenecks
• 2) Decide how to exploit the bottlenecks (bring bottleneck itself to maximum throughput)
• 3) Subordinate everything else to the above decisions (everything marches to the tune of bottleneck)
• 4) Elevate the systems bottlenecks (Improve throughput through measures outside bottleneck)
• 5) if a bottleneck has been broen go back to step 1
• Or
• 1) Identify the systems constraint(s)
• 2) Decide how to exploit the systems constraint
• 3) Subordinate everything else to the above decision
• 4) Elevate the systems constraint(s)
• We must put our finger on the core problem, on the root that causes them all
• The problem is that the time it takes material to be converted to a finished product, ready for delivery to the client, depends more on the time it has to wait in queues and not so mich on the touch time to process the order.