One week, Bob Evans, a project manager at Google, challenged a cliché in software development, “Good, fast or cheap — pick two,” meaning you can’t have all three. To Mr. Evans, fast and cheap — and highly adaptable — is good by definition, allowing engineers to identify needed updates, repairs and new features. Creating a polished product before it is ever put to use is pointless, he told the class, because it will always need to be changed. “Software is one brief moment of creation and a lifetime of maintenance,” he said.
Cornell NYC Tech, Planned for Roosevelt Island, Starts Up in Chelsea. This release-and-iterate model is probably just great if you’re building something, but it stinks for us users. We get to try half-baked products, help the builders fix it, and then stand by helplessly as they sell themselves and their technology to a bigger company that shuts the service down. Here’s hoping that Cornell won’t be training these people in Worst Practices of Software Design.