The Pebble and the Avalanche

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Current Revolutions in Business and Technology

by Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky,

author of The Pebble and The Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions

 

Thu, 2006-Sep-14, 10:47

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Getting that Design Right

I'm in the middle of a project: I'm designing some software that will help guard the privacy of my telephone calls. Right now, if I give someone my telephone number, I've surrendered any control over what the person does with it. I've come up with a method to recapture some of my privacy. I'll post details when it's ready for testing.

But as I was formulating the design, I realized that I had lots of choices to make. How complex should the database be? I can think of many different features and enhancements, and the more features I add, the more complex the database becomes. How could I accommodate all these features?

And then I remembered that I'd written a book about the subject... The answer is to make this a narrowly-focused piece of software, and to build interfaces to other pieces of software that provide other functions. My system will be built from the ground up as disaggregated modules. The design is simpler, the testing and debugging is easier, and I can literally have it ready in a day instead of an entire month.

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