These essays remain available as a record. They no longer define Nuovus’s editorial direction.
In software, the "enemy" is not bad faith or incompetence. Usually it is complexity, hidden coupling, changing context, and the basic fact that delivery plans are built on assumptions about systems and people that have not been stress-tested yet.
A quiet change is happening in software engineering, and it has very little to do with prettier autocomplete.
Hierarchies were not some grand theory about how people work best together. They were the cheapest way to move information around a company back when moving information was slow and expensive. That cost is collapsing now, and a lot of org charts are starting to look like the workarounds they always were.
Institutional memory does not live in the wiki. It lives in three people, two of whom are on holiday. A short note on where a company's knowledge actually sits, and why it keeps leaking out.
Most of what keeps a company running still gets done by hand, in the gaps between systems that were never designed to talk to each other. We think that is about to change, and it is worth being precise about what changes with it.
The dashboard was supposed to save you work. Instead it invented a new job: watching the dashboard. A short argument for why looking at something is not the same as knowing it.
A meeting is often a workaround for a system that cannot tell people what they need to know. Some meetings are real work. Most are repairs. Learning to tell the two apart is worth the effort.
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