Avoiding hassle is especially important for a bootstrapped company. As discussed in my previous post about the spiderweb entrepreneur, in the early stages of bootstrapping, nothing happens unless YOU do it, so it’s incredibly important to conserve your time and energy.

Ifyou want to absolutely minimize hassle as you run your software business, you can stick to each one of these rules, which I present in no particular order:

Many developers have been voicing their concerns about Agile being broken lately. Among them are prominent figures like Robert C. Martin and Kent Beck – two of the people who charted the Agile Manifesto. Some of the most frequently-mentioned problems with Agile are: Agile ignores technical debt; frameworks like Scrum are just “red tape,” which they were never supposed to be; programmers are asked to commit to arbitrary estimates and deadlines and never get the time to think thoroughly about the features they’re creating. So if we can acknowledge and work on these problems, perhaps we can fix Agile.

A good software architect, as well as a good project manager, doesn’t need meetings and never organizes them.

Meetings demotivate, waste time, burn money, and degrade quality. But more about that later. For now, let’s discuss a proposed alternative.

It’s especially important that kids get bored — and be allowed to stay bored — when they’re young. That it not be considered “a problem” to be avoided or eradicated by the higher-ups, but instead something kids grapple with on their own.

We’ve stopped training children to do this. Rather than teach them to absorb material that is slower, duller and decidedly two-dimensional, like a lot of worthwhile information is, schools cave in to what they say children expect: fun. Teachers spend more time concocting ways to “engage” students through visuals and “interactive learning” (read: screens, games) tailored to their Candy Crushed attention spans. Kids won’t listen to long lectures, goes the argument, so it’s on us to serve up learning in easier-to-swallow portions.

We need to have a lot of difficult conversations in order to resolve the issues we are facing as a society, and the only way these conversations will be productive and enduring is if we all can agree on the facts. Right now, with Americans believing more than 40 percent of the news they see is fake, we aren’t quite there as a society, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be. The internet is an amazing tool, but to use it most effectively we have to embrace its benefits while also understanding the ways in which it makes us vulnerable. If students are still learning dated practices such as cursive writing in school, shouldn’t they be learning how to navigate and consume the internet responsibly as well?

Since 1945, the United States has very rarely achieved meaningful victory. The United States has fought five major wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan — and only the Gulf War in 1991 can really be classified as a clear success.

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The US doesn’t think several moves ahead. The US military is good at taking out bad guys. But the removal of the bad guy creates a power vacuum, and that power vacuum is filled by somebody else.

In Afghanistan, we created disorder and then the Taliban returned — the power vacuum there was also filled by ISIS. And in Iraq, the vacuum was filled by militant groups, most notably al-Qaeda in Iraq. In Libya, the vacuum was filled by a complicated range of militant groups.

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We’re still stuck in this view that war is like the Super Bowl: We meet on the field, both sides have uniforms, we score points, someone wins, and when the game ends you go home. That’s not what war is like now. Now there are tons of civilians on the field, the enemy team doesn’t wear a uniform, and the game never ends. We need to know there’s no neat ending.

E-mail was once the pillar of the Internet as a truly distributed, standards-based and non-centralized means to communication with people across the planet. Today, an increasing number of services people rely on are losing federation and interoperability by companies who need to keep people engaged on their for-profit services. Much of the Internet’s communication is moving to these walled gardens, leaving those who want to run their own services in an increasingly hostile communication landscape.

On the topic of copyright, you NOW have the chance to have an influence – a chance that will be long lost in two years, when we’ll all be “suddenly” faced with the challenge of having to implement upload filters and the “link tax” – or running into new limits on what we can do using the web services we rely on.

In stark contrast to the GDPR, experts near-unanimously agree that the copyright reform law, as it stands now, is really bad. Where in the case of the GDPR the EU institutions pushed through many changes against the concerted lobbying efforts of big business interests, in the copyright reform they are about to give them exactly what they want.

The fact that Google advertises their servers as supporting CardDAV is an insult to anyone who does try to be standards compliant.

The Google CardDAV server has similarities to what we call CardDAV. For very simple, controlled stuff, it may be possible to pretend it is.

For anything advanced, avoid it at all cost.

In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, draws a portrait of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear: America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly different resources, expectations, and fates.

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The two sectors, notes Temin, have entirely distinct financial systems, residential situations, and educational opportunities. Quite different things happen when they get sick, or when they interact with the law. They move independently of each other. Only one path exists by which the citizens of the low-wage country can enter the affluent one, and that path is fraught with obstacles. Most have no way out.

The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.