Gandalf Hudlow
The value-destroying effect of arbitrary date pressure on code
An Article by Gandalf HudlowThe mandate from above is clear, just get it done! Avoid everything that's in the way: all advice, all expertise, all discovery efforts that detract from hitting the Date™!
What these organizations don't realize is that all software change can be modeled as three components: Value, Filler and Chaos. Chaos destroys Value and Filler is just functionality that nobody wants. When date pressure is applied to software projects, the work needed to remove Chaos is subtly placed on the chopping block. Work like error handling, clear logging, chaos & load testing and other quality work is quietly deferred in favor of hitting the Date™.
Software that nobody wants
An Article by Gandalf HudlowFinding value is the result of enabling individual and group-level discovery attempts. It's not the result of everyone following one leader's gut.
What just happened is a new software product/feature was created that no customer wanted. This happens way too often. In fact, most hyper important software projects that must be done by date certain or else, have deep flaws that cause some variation of this phenomenon, flaws that include:
- Not wanted - Company specified a solution to a problem that customers don't actually have
- No Rarity - Company is pursuing an iKnockoff of existing products. The market already has two scaled competitors with working solutions, customers naturally spend budget on products that are already successful to avoid risk
- Incorrect Packaging - Customers need a website, but the company created an iOS app instead
- Incorrect Pricing - Customers need SaaS pricing, but the company created a shrink wrapped, on-premise solution with CapEx and maintenance agreements instead
Phenomenal: An Introduction
Aesthetic palate cleansing
During the 1960s and 1970s, light became the primary medium for a loosely affiliated group of artists working in Greater Los Angeles who were more intrigued by questions of perception than by the notion of crafting discrete objects.
...Often with modest means (a bolt of scrim, a sheet of glass, a bucket of resin, an open window) these artists engaged in a kind of aesthetic palate cleansing, shaking off the art-historical weight and heavy impasto of midcentury painting as it had been influentially practiced in New York and San Francisco.
Not intended to be read until you have seen
This is not a catalogue because there is no list of works. The exhibition will comprise three spaces in which three artists will have made their art. At the moment of writing we are not sure exactly what they will do—and we cannot know how what they do will appear to us. Therefore we cannot attempt to help you perceive it. So this is also not truly an introduction to the art. It is not intended to be read until you have seen the exhibition.
A vaporous middle-world
In between these two extremes is a room with three constructions by Robert Irwin. These can be read as individual works of art but their function here is primarily that of creating a climate of fastidious ambiguity. Light turns into a new kind of material; new kinds of material are fused into light; a vaporous middle-world stands midway between total black (Bell) and total white (Wheeler)