A while back I was helping organize MoscowJS, a meetup that by now has turned into a larger event. Before I stepped down as an organizer, I wrote a bunch of docs for future speakers and organizers and put it on Github. I remembered that recently and decided to revive…

Rethinking best practices when iterating on a product idea — This article is a follow-up to my talk. You can watch the video recording of the talk in Russian or in English: Established companies build products according to specs. That’s turning words into mockups and code. It’s easy. Startups and innovation teams don’t have specs, only…

Code Podcast, Episode 8: P2P People to People — Slack servers are down and work stops. Facebook sells users’ personal data to third-parties with no negative consequences to the company. Turkey successfully blocks citizens’ access to Wikipedia. Those are all results of peoples’ decisions of course, but there’s also something else at play. …

In this post I’d like to talk about the goal of the project and how we are working towards it. The goal of Polychops to help musicians get better faster. There are two critical directions we are exploring to help us to get to that goal. Inspiring people to practice more; Improving the quality of practice, so musicians can get more results out of their practice time. Currently Polychops is in private beta. If you’d like to try it out or get notified when it comes out, please sign up at polychops.com.

Part 4 of the series “Theory of Constraints in software startups” — This is the fourth post in the series “Theory of Constraints in software startups.” If you haven’t read the others, I recommend starting here: part 1. There are thousands of possible reasons for a piece of software to not perform well. Thousands. How many ways do we have of finding…

The closest I’ve got to interesting my colleagues in Theory of Constraints was when I gave a puzzle to our CEO. He loves puzzles. After he got it wrong a couple of times I got his attention. I’ll share both the problem and the solution in this post. You can…

Running Kanban like it’s 1984 — This is the third post in the series “Theory of Constraints in software startups.” If you haven’t read the other two. I recommend starting with those: part 1, part 2. Everything was better in the 80s, so let’s go back in time for a minute. Imagine you are a worker…

Part 2 of the series “Theory of Constraints in software startups” — This is the second post in a series. If you haven’t read the first one yet, I recommend you check it out here, otherwise some of the ideas might not make sense. With an understanding of our system, its goal and measurements we know what kinds of work we shouldn’t…

Part 1 of the series “Theory of Constraints in software startups” — “We need more people” how often do you hear this argument from your manager? If only we had more people, maybe a bit more time and money — we’d achieve all the targets we’ve set for ourselves. We’d finish all the projects we have committed to. …