With every year that passed, as Perl 6 produced more press releases than actual code, the attractiveness of Perl as a platform declined. Sure, it still had users. Sure, it still had people starting new projects. (The Modern Perl movement was a decent attempt to bring wider enthusiasm back into the ecosystem by dispelling some of the worst myths of the language. It modeled itself after JavaScript: The Good Parts without realizing that Perl lacked JavaScript's insurmountable advantage of ubiquity. Who could have predicted that Objective-C would be interesting again a year before the iPhone came out?)

What it didn't have was a clearly defined future, let alone an articulated one.

Here’s part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture.

Here’s the scene: A problem has come up with one of your supply chain vendors, threatening to delay timely shipment of your product. At the same time, a potential opportunity appears that, with some exploration and investment, could lead to a new generation of products down the road. Which do you respond to first?

An informed guide to misconceptions of Agile.

I recently came across a rather misinformed document called the Anti-Agile Manifesto. Normally, I just ignore this sort of thing, but in this case, people I know who are in the exploratory phase of agile adoption were treating the document seriously. Because the thinking in this document, which is not uncommon, undermines the success of fledgling agile shops, it seemed worth discussing it.

First a definition: A story point is a measure of the effort required to build out a story. It has nothing to do with time. Points usually occur on a 1-to-5 scale (where 1 represents a trivial effort), but some prefer a Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…) because the further you get from trivial, the more the effort ratchets up. I can't emphasize too strongly that this measure has nothing to do with time beyond the broad observation that hard stuff takes longer. There is no way to map a point to a particular time interval.

In other words, you're estimating something concrete — a fixed set of features. To insist on meeting an estimate at a fixed deadline is to commit to building that set of features. That set is bound to be wrong, however, so the estimate is bound to be meaningless. Committing to the deadline is effectively a commitment to build the wrong product.

I'm not sure about you, but in my "real world," building a product that nobody's going to buy isn't a particularly important goal.

The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner made entirely of Lego. Take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings will be magically synchronised to an online, digital calendar. It makes the most of the tangibility of physical objects, and the ubiquity of digital platforms.

We work a 4-day week (M-Th, 9-6) because we think that information work isn’t like manufacturing. Another hour at the MacBook won’t yield another $1,000 in profit. We believe that smart folks can get five days of work done in four days. Simple as that.

Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it’s against democracy. § [...] § But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.

Having been through multiple launches, seen companies launch at big conferences, and talked with many startups that have experienced the same effect, what I recommend – and what we’re doing at Origami - is not launching at all. Take the word launch out of your vocabulary – it’s a sign that you are gambling on your app and not building a long-term, sustainable company. Instead, put your sign-up page up or your app out because you need more feedback on your idea. Find an audience of passionate users, even if small, and reach out to their community through appropriate means. Try SEM and Facebook ads to find a target market. Experiment with business models and onboarding flows. Let the press come to you because they love what you’ve made.