innovation culture

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world:... See more

I think there is a similar fallacy for how we consider engineering organizations. Many of today’s “best practices” have been drawn from long-established internet companies like Google. However, the problem with copying their current practices on the basis of their success is that most of those companies found near-invincible business models that... See more

What happens when you give a load of engineers a brief? I always ask the question: What would’ve happened if you hadn’t given the brief for High Speed 2 to a load of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed, time, distance, capacity? What if you’d given the brief to Disney instead?

They would’ve said, “First of all, we’re going to rewrite... See more

big problems get solved in small rooms.

Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this was a constant battle with Xerox). In the end, all the technologies got out in useful ways. ARPA was non-profit, but had many commercial spin-offs, and this was regarded as "the way things should be"... See more

Web developer's oath

Before the exercises, let me remind what you promised at the end of the previous part.

Programming is hard, that is why I will use all the possible means to make it easier

• I will have my browser developer console open all the time


• I progress with small steps


• I will write lots of console.log statements to make sure I understand how

... See more