Stefan’s blog

Following my recent thoughts about 80:20 rule I was looking for some online productivity tips and found that there are actually many clever companies online. At this presentation Juan from MindValley shares his interesting 4 step execution process:

• 1st find leverage points - what are 5, 6 most important things
• focus on these important leverage points
• simplify as much as you can (KISS?
• take massive action

Last week I started to work on semestr.cz, a portal for university students to share papers online and I split the features to four sets - user registration, user account, document feeds and relationships. These are four main important things. How much time I spent developing it? Document feeds - two days, user account - one day. User registration and user relationships needs to be developed. If this will work out, it will be my fastest developed portal in history. Though it took 10 days to set-up regioninfo.eu. This one will be done in one week of working time. I find it amazing what you can do with today’s technology if you choose right approach.

All the web development stuff is less and less about development and more and more about design and management.

There is a huge difference between IT person a developer and a business person a developer. A developer (IT educated, computer science etc…) lives in models, math, algorithms, develops and writes a lot of “perfect” code, right to the specification! He uses first, second, third framework on top of one another. He does things because they are supposed to be done that way…

A business person, a developer educated on a business school has completely different approach, he is lazy to write a lot of code. He uses just one framework. He plans, he analyses and than he writes 80% less of the code than computer science person. Instead of doing things “the supposed way” he challenges dogmas and finds different approach.

I know some IT people, they talk bullshit. I can not stand some of them. You meet such a geek and he will tell you how exciting that piece of code is. I know some business people, they are right to the core. How to do it the most efficient and easiest way, how to do less. Well it saves money doesn’t it? They will tell you how exiting is that they manage to set-up e-shop in a few days, how exciting is the outcome and how much they saved that way.

What is the fundamental difference? Business people even though they may not know the Pareto principle they employ it and behave by it naturally. That is that 20% of causes results in 80% of effects roughly.  So business educated developers focus on those 20% of functionality to develop which provides the highest 80% value. Computer science educated developers focus on 100% and they waste 80% of their attention to unimportant bullshit providing just 20% of value.

The drawback? You never get 100% from a business educated developer. The benefit? You get what will fulfill most of your needs, costs less and it is highly manageable in the future.

Did you get it? Big advice to all computer science developers: Your work will suck unless you focus on those 20% providing 80% of outcome. And advice for you? Why do you need 100% anyway. I am sure you will be much better off with a business educated web developer than with a computer science developer, because they can provide that cumulative magic.

Now when I told you golden rule of business educated developers, I am going to kill you :).

I am happy business minded web developer and if you need agile web development you can still hire me.