Russell Pollari
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From experience, I know how easy it can be to over-engineer a feature nobody actually wants, or succumb to the sunk-cost fallacy and continue down the wrong product path for too long. To counteract these mistakes, you need to build a habit of constantly questioning your decisions – of keeping the bigger picture in mind.…
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For the last year or so, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with habit formation. It started as a personal journey to be more productive and was amplified after reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. This year, instead of setting brand new goals, I’ve taken a look at my habits over the past year and looked for…
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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” is common business wisdom. It is especially important advice for startups searching for product/market fit via the build-measure-learn feedback loop, a major part of the Lean Startup ethos. Build something. Measure its effect. Learn what worked, what didn’t. Repeat. The ability to execute this loop quickly…
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I gave a tutorial to the SharpestMinds community this week on Flask and Heroku that proved useful. So I edited it and uploaded it. I essentially live code a basic web app from scratch to host an image classifier. It is scrappy and cuts a few corners, but the result is a working MVP. I…
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There is a concept in criminology known as broken windows theory. It says that crime in a community can be significantly reduced by reducing signs of disorder (like broken windows) and policing minor but visible crimes like vandalism. The theory rests on the assumption that an area’s environment has a big influence on the behavior…
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Estimating the time for software projects is notoriously difficult. This is because the majority of the work in most software projects is “discovered” work. Work that was not obvious while planning that is discovered when implementing. If you’ve done any serious programming work, you’ll know what I’m talking about. “Turns out this 3rd party API…
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As SharpestMinds matures as a company, good design is becoming increasingly important. For most of the company’s lifetime, we embraced a design-on-the-fly, just-make-it-work attitude. Without much more than a text or verbal description, we would simultaneously plan, implement, and design new features for our web-app. This approach worked well enough while we iterated towards product/market…
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This is one of those decisions that is so context specific that almost all advice on it is worthless. Nevertheless, I thought I’d share the story of when I had to make this decision as a beginner programmer. There may be a lesson or two. In the summer of 2018, SharpestMinds was a platform for…
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An important lesson I’ve learned in the last year is how important environment is for forming productive habits. Good habits don’t arise from exerting more will power. Instead, they come from engineering an environment that makes good habits easier, and bad habits harder. For example, If you want to play more guitar and less video…
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Meetings are an inevitable part of business but they are costly. Everyone involved has to take time away from their work day to participate. Having no process in place for conducting meetings practically guarantees wasted time. Meetings are a medium of work. People’s time is highly valuable so all meetings should be purposeful and well…
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