The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.

Great insights @ https://clig.dev/#output like Responsive is more important than fast I have to update the list of areas where interface design applies : APIs Query Languages CLIs

Don’t document the obvious: I see too many documents that contain sentences like “Name field - contains the name”. Tell me about what I may not know - restrictions on characters, how these are sorted, what if someone doesn’t have a first name, etc. Gregor Hohpe

The core conflict of developer tools is Abstraction vs. complexity Jean Young https://future.com/the-case-for-developer-experience/

Given the right documentation, self-service API integration should come naturally, right? What is the proper documentation though and who defines that? Working with teams to reduce the problem to a “set of questions” that the docs must answer, can help you move towards self-service.

Creativity comes from constraint.

Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.

‘Who’ questions to ask when leading change: The included: Who else could be or needs to be included in what I’m doing? The informants: Who has done things like this in the past that I can lean on for support? The advisors: who could I get advice from or interview to get more insight? The creatives: Who comes from a different field of work, and could add a creative angle to my change?

An important quality of API design is minimalism, also called #orthogonality. This is a quality shared with programming language design as well. Adding new terms or concepts complicates the design. It adds rules, exceptions, and quirks, thus making it harder to learn. An example is the famous “verb in the resource name” dilemma.

There are three perspectives in software development that are not well aligned: academia, thought-leaders/influencers and the work being done in practice. Jean Young