Informal Brain

There are two things Firefox can do that Safari can’t:

1. Set pipelining on. Although there is risk that the web servers can’t support pipelining it provides a nice speedup on a high-speed connection.

2. Allow tweaking of the Connections per server setting. This is technically against the recommendations of the w3c protocol but when you have lots of bandwidth you can really get a nice performance boost pulling down the attached images.

I wonder when Safari will support these settings? I wonder when the max connections per server will be increased by default?

I loved this example from Joel on Software:

Before joining Juno, I worked at Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), where my experience had been very different. A bit of Redmond lore: Two software designers got into a debate over how something should be implemented. The question was highly technical. They couldn’t reach agreement, so they went to their boss, a guy named Mike Maples, who was the vice president in charge of the applications division.

“What do I know about this?” he yelled at them. “Of the three people in this room, I’m the one who knows the least. You guys have been hashing this out for hours. I’m the last person who should be deciding. Work it out.”

And so they did.

[From How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers -- Fog Creek Software -- Small Business Advice]

So often the inclination of middle managers is to try and solve this type of problem by making a decision. What I am seeing is more often is a need to add structure to the debate. For example: The manager captures decisions, action items, risks, and parking lot items on a whiteboard while the technical people work it out. The facilitator gets out of the way and lets the technical people do their job; period.