June 2023
Intermediate to advanced
356 pages
5h 32m
English
Content preview from How to Make Things Faster
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 104. Fail Fast
Among movements like Agile, Lean Startup, and Design Thinking these days, you hear the term fail fast. The principle of failing fast is vital to efficiency, but I’ve seen project managers and business partners be offended or even agitated by the term fail fast. I’ve seen it come out like, “Why the hell would I want to fail fast?! I don’t want to fail at all.” The implication, of course: failing is for losers—if you’re planning to fail, then I don’t want you on my team.
I think I can help explain why the principle of fail fast is so important, and maybe I can help you explain it, too.
Software developers know about fail fast already, whether they realize it or not. In 2006, I blogged about an example.1 It had been a really long day. I didn’t leave my office until after 9 p.m., and then I turned my laptop back on as soon as I got home to work another three hours. I had been fighting a bug all day. It was a program that ran about 90 seconds normally, but when I tried a code path that should have been much faster, I could let it run fifty times that long and it still wouldn’t finish.
At home, I ran it again and left it running while I watched TV, assuming the program would finish eventually, so I could see its log file (which I wasn’t flushing often enough, which was another problem). My MacBook Pro’s fan was running so loud that my son asked me if it was OK. The whole time, I was thinking, “I wish this thing would fail faster.” And there it is.
When you know ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.