Why things are the way they are.
Research, stories and engineering notes on how companies lose, and keep, the reasons behind their systems.
The 15% cap nobody could explain
One small change to a discount limit, five weeks of damage, and the one question that would have stopped it.
- Research
42% of what your company knows lives in one person's head
What the research says about knowledge that never gets written down, and why it hits business rules hardest.
- Engineering
Your engineers spend most of their time understanding, not building
Field studies and developer surveys agree. The bottleneck is not writing code, it is finding out why the code is the way it is.
- Engineering
45 minutes, $460 million, and a flag nobody remembered
What the Knight Capital failure teaches about old code, reused switches, and decisions nobody can explain.
- Leadership
Chesterton's fence, for business rules
Don't remove a rule until you know why it was put there. A century-old principle, and why it is so hard to follow in software.
- Research
Why documentation goes stale, and what to do instead
Documentation is written once and silently drifts. Records that know when they are out of date work differently.
- om
Why om asks instead of guessing
A model can read what a system does. Only the person who decided knows why, and a confident guess is worse than an honest "unknown".
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