The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 5. Keeping Up with Users

In [the] Diffusion of Innovations, it is not people who change, but the innovations themselves...The success of an innovation depends on how well it evolves to meet the needs of more and more demanding and risk-averse individuals in a population.

“The Innovation-Adoption Curve” by High Tech Strategies

My two-plus decades in the software industry have given me a front row seat to the rise of incremental shipping. I have felt the benefits deeply, and it leads me to push my teams to ship more frequently.

My first ship, and therefore my first shipped bug, was Microsoft Visual C++ compiler in 2005, and it was a doozy. Customers received the compiler on CD, installed it on their computer, ran it and, if they happened to be using Simplified Chinese, the compiler simply crashed. Always!

There was no way to distribute a patch, and the next release was years out, so instead, we put an article in the knowledge base with the workaround—to delete a certain file from the app’s directory before attempting to compile code.

That was my worst bug ever. This says more about the improving software industry than my improving skill.

Later, I worked on Windows 7 which took three years to build and ship, still in boxes of CDs for some customers. We had no unit tests or feature tests—we still relied heavily on test engineers to test our code. But at least Windows could be patched for critical fixes.

In 2009, I moved on to Facebook, where deploys happened every week! ...