Anthony Panozzo's Blog

There are many books out there on effecting change in an organization. But what if effecting change is not the most effective strategy?

A Story

Imagine for a moment that you have recently heard about a new recursive development technique called "DDD Driven Development." The proponents of DDD (a recursive acronym) claim that it speeds up your development cycles by increasing feedback, but only anecdotal data exists so far. Some groups have claimed it led to higher system reliability and development speed, others the opposite.

As team lead, you pick up the premier DDD book and read through it. The arguments, while not airtight, seem to indicate that at least some aspects of the approach would be useful in your organization.

You play around with the techniques in a personal project, and then pitch using DDD on a pilot project. The project goes mostly smoothly, and most of the team members agree that it was useful. A couple dissent, and you can see that it might be difficult to get buy-in from other engineers in the organization who are not as open to change.

At one of the Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle meetups, someone asked questions along the following lines (paraphrased):

Won't using lean startup techniques reduce my commitment to an idea? If I can just walk away from something because I have not invested much in it, how do I know that I won't give up too early?

I had a bit of cognitive dissonance about the question. At first, I thought the line of thinking was silly. After all, the whole reason I was there was to ensure that I didn't go "all-in" on an idea with no validation. I responded intelligently at the time, but the question kind of gnawed at me.

I brought up RailsThemes in an earlier post, and figured I'd post an update about how we are working on it and what I have learned so far.

RailsThemes is a project that I'm working on with Eliza Brock and Luke Flener. It is like WordPress themes, but for Ruby on Rails applications. Basically you purchase a theme on our website, and then you can install it on the command-line and have a site that is easy on the eyes in a matter of minutes. Traditionally, you would have to spend a lot of time and money to get a good looking theme.

What day of the week is it again?

Eliza lives in Nashville. I live in Indianapolis. Yet we were able to spend about two weeks together in the same location working on the project over the course of a couple of months due to some creative scheduling.

The benefits of working in close physical proximity are fairly well documented (see Peopleware). For me it is speed of getting feedback, better design sessions, and general morale boosts.

In this article, I argue that today will always be the best day to try or learn something new.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks (well you can, but it's hard)

Neuroplasticity is the brain's way of reprogramming itself based on what it does. Your brain actually changes structure with new experiences. Brains also change based on what you think about. So giving energy to the kinds of thoughts you want to have, makes them form more easily the next time. This is one of the advantages of writing (it's a form of caching thoughts).

Someone who starts playing piano for one year at age seven will likely be much better than someone who starts playing piano at age seventy for one year. Generally, the younger someone is, the less hard-wired and the more open to change their brain is. The seventy-year-old might have a better strategy for learning or more discipline, but learning is going to be harder. Neurons die every day, and they are the things gray matter is made of.

Useful versus true beliefs

There are several kinds of beliefs:

Since leaving RewardSnap in the summer of 2011, I took about a month off, and then got back to business. This post is an update of what I've been working on and interested in since then:

Current projects and interests:

• RailsThemes.com (new project!)
• consulting/contracting
• Awesome Controller
• Desperately Seeking Validation
• office hours
• Hamming Lunches

RailsThemes.com

A new project!

I had been putting together various websites using purchasable themes from sites like ThemeForest, and it took at least a couple of hours each to translate the HTML and CSS to a format that Rails is happy with that looks like the theme is intended to look. I explained my solution idea to Eliza–basically a themes site for Rails apps–and she started running full speed with it. She called me up the next day and was like, "so I figured out the launch schedule for this." I was like, "whoa, whoa, I don't remember signing up for this officially."

Anyway, I drove to Tennessee Tuesday and we worked until noon on Thursday on ramping up the project. We have a great designer, Luke Flener, for the initial templates and site design, I'm working on the development back-end side of things, and Eliza is heading up the marketing and user-facing development. There's still quite a bit of work to do before our launch in April. Over the course of the last couple of days, we worked on

If you're interested in project updates or to eventually purchase a design for your Rails project, check out RailsThemes.com. Also, if you are interested in contributing designs, we are interested in talking with you about it. Thanks!