Harry Potter has an owl, Hedwig. I want one, too. For many times, I wished I had one. That would have saved me a lot of time and hassles. Here are three examples.

Example one: repair my iPad. Last Saturday night, the home button on my iPad stopped working. I went to the Apple Store in the university village in Seattle on Sunday morning. The store was full of people and I was told that the waiting time would be half an hour. So I made an appointment in the afternoon, hoping that would get shorter wait. But when I came back and checked in on time, I still waited more than twenty minutes until I got help. The rest didn’t take more than a couple minutes. Since I was still in warranty, I simply got a replacement iPad. I wish I had an owl, which can carry my iPad to the store, get replacement and fly back, so that I don’t have visit the Apple Store in person and wait in line.

Example two: pharmacy trip. We were traveling in San Francisco last year and in that night, my boy had fever and cough. My wife needed help but we had to get some Tylenol. It was after midnight and not quite easy to get a cab. It took me about an hour to get the Tylenol from a 24-hours pharmacy several miles away. If I had an owl, I would have sent my owl to the pharmacy so that I could stay with my boy and give my wife help.

Example three: garage door. Yeah, there are many people like me: I often don’t remember whether I have shut my garage door, so I come back from a few blocks away to double check. For the record, I did forget for a couple times. So it wasn’t always wasteful. But if I had an owl, I would keep going and send my owl back to take a peek. After that, the owl would fly back to where I am, which might have been several miles away from where I launched her.

Harry Potter’s owl only lives in the books and movies. The owl that I want will be a drone, a smart drone. It may take quite a few years to get there: that I can send my smart drone to run the errands for me. There will be things to iron out, such as what if somebody shoots down my drone and takes my replacement iPad; how will it launch and land in urban area; etc.. Affordability is a thing, too. But thirty years ago, a PC wasn’t too affordable and twenty years ago, a cell phone wasn’t too affordable.

I believe the dream will come true and when I am old, I will send my drone to pick up my prescriptions rather than going to the Walgreens by myself.

GPS is making traffic congestion worse, as more people more rely on GPS to find their way home. GPS’ routing algorithm is so repeatable that from a given point A to point B, it always gives the same route (note: recently some GPS devices introduced the “eco” mode, whose routing algorithm optimize for less fuel instead of less travel time. But it doesn’t change the deterministic nature of GPS routing algorithm). Some time some people want to take a bit detour, knowing the local roads (rather than the highway that GPS suggested), which cars drive slower though, may have much less traffic which eventually may result in less travel time. But GPS always faithfully and promptly recalculate and suggest a new route leading back to the congested highway. I don’t have the exact data but I believe that as the result of GPS recommending the same route to everybody, the worth of time and fuel wasted and the extra emission will add up huge.

Another problem of GPS always recommending the same route is that it deprives our opportunity to explore. The best way to know the area that I live is to see where there are what in my own eyes. Often times, when I drive passing a corner, I noticed a nice shop and remembered to pay a visit later; I noticed that there was a farmer’s market on that street on Saturday morning; I noticed that there was a drive-through 24 hours Walgreens on that block; so on and so on. To me personally, such way (knowing my area by driving around) works better than Bing/Google maps, Yelp and yellow pages. Also, when I’m travelling in other cities, I have abundant time and I want to drive around to discover the things that I won’t see if I just follow GPS’ directions from A to B.

So for those two reasons, I think GPS should have the exploratory mode (or maybe “Surprise Me” would be a catchier name): instead of reliably always recommend the same route with the least travel time (or least fuel consumption), I hope I can switch my GPS into the exploratory mode, so that it adds some detours, as far as it only adds a couple minutes travel time or a couple miles distances. Better if the GPS can remember where I have been already recently, so that next time when it introduces the detour in exploratory mode, it takes me to the neighborhood where I haven’t been to recently.

Such exploratory mode may also enable a new monetization way: local business can pay the GPS/map providers so that the exploratory mode increases the odds to detour the driver to where that local business is.

In my opinion, such exploratory mode will be a good differentiator in today’s market, not too hard to implement and increases profitability.

When I read the news these days, I see lots of startups using misspelled words as their names, though when you read them, they pronounce like legit words. A few of them have grown pretty big, such as: Flickr (flicker), Tumblr (tumbler) and Reddit (read it).

There are more out there:

• Flayvr (a photo organization site)
• Drync (an app for wine lover)
• Loudr (a music seller)
• TheKitchn (a recipe site)
• Sprinklr (they say they do social experience management)
• Cloaq (an anonymous app)
• Evrythng (they do Web of Things)
• Rdio (a music site)
• Kabbage (an online loan site)
• Automattic (a web development company)

The list goes on and on.

Why they are using misspelled words as company names? In one of his post, Jeff Knupp said: “Start-ups don’t make developers wear multiple hats by choice, they do so out of necessity“. Similarly, I believe startups chose the misspelled words as their names out of two necessities.

First, domain names are very expensive. It was said that XiaoMi paid tens of millions of dollars for the new domain name mi.com (was xiaomi.com). I also heard that JD.com paid a lot for the new domain name, to replace 360buy.com. I haven’t seen any rumor about box.com, but I believe the price tag must be at least multi million. To get more idea about the hefty price tag on domain names, go to godaddy.com and check it out.

Second, I guess those misspelled names are good SEO (search engine optimization). For example, see what you can get by searching for “louder” in Bing. But if you search for “loudr”, loudr.fm pops up as the first result.

One of my team members shared this article with me: Treat bugs as fires. The author said,

“There are software devs who follow a different approach. They focus on fire prevention, not fire cure. Sure, they have to put out fires. But they use each fire as an opportunity to learn how to prevent fires, and then they build new parts of the city in a way that prevents the fires they have seen. Over time, these teams live in cities that don’t burn down. They go weeks and months between alarms going off. They rarely even have building code violations (risks found by QA or build verification tools).”

There are very few number of such teams. It’s because balancing between firefighting vs. fire prevention is hard:

1. Firefighting is heroic and many managements reward such heroic behavior. If they don’t do so, there will be no fire fighters. The dilemma is: then, preventing fire is less rewarded than firefighting and it’s human nature to go after bigger rewards. So fewer people will do fire prevention and more people will do firefighting.

2. Few people stay in the same place long enough to start to harvest from their investments in fire prevention. To optimize for the outcome in 18 months, I would rather to cut a lot corners in order to ship a lot of shining features, get a promotion, and move on. The corner-cutting will hurt us after 2-3 years, but why would I care if I am not here anymore?

Both need to be address by the managements:

For (1), the managements have to first be conscious about how he/she is rewarding firefighting vs. fire prevention. Then find out a balanced way to encourage fire prevention while keep firefighters a desired job.

For (2), attrition is natural, but the managements can keep people stay a bit longer and can make ownership stable. It also depends on the management’s judgment. Management needs to point it out when people cut corner and punish people if it’s too much.

That’s why the management is so critical (especially the first line as well as middle management). If the management fails to steer the team toward the right balance between firefighting vs. fire prevention, or the management themselves only plan to be here for 18 months, the team/product has little chance to thrive.

I have been always thinking that we are very early in the history of software. Using timepiece as a metaphor:

• The software in the 50’s and 60’s were like the sundial.
• The software in the 80’s are like the clock made in 16th century: need to be wound daily, and off by a couple minutes daily.
• The software today are somewhat like the first generation of pocket watch, such as those made by John Harrison: they are pretty sophisticated and works really well, but each of them took John a dozen years to make.

Today there are very few number of watches are handmade. Most of them are hand-assembled, or purely machine made. When we look at the craftsmanship a few centuries ago, we don’t think their techniques are too impressive. A teenage today probably knows everything that the greatest mathematics and physicists knows in the 17-18th century. I believe, in maybe 50 years from now, when people look back at us and how we make software today, they will have similar feeling.

Today, all software are handmade. It has been talked for a decade or two about producing software in the way how today’s plants produce cars. But I believe there will be another several decades when that become true. By the time we retire, I believe most of the software will be written by software. There will be very few of software engineers at that moment. Their main job is to write the “seed” software or component, to kick-start the whole software-writing-software chain. When software is written by software, bugs will be like the fires.