Utility · for the build days
Resources
The week's rules each stand on a named idea from engineering practice, and the readings below are where the ideas live in their general form. They are short; one per evening over the build days covers the lot, and each will sound familiar, because the hub's pages are these ideas sized to a two-person bench.
What governs
- The LIA brief, on Omnivox: D4's exact contents, submission and marking; the milestone's three faces carry its logic, and the brief wins any conflict.
- The in-class announcement for December 7's demonstration slots and timing.
The ideas behind the rules
| Reading | The idea | Where this week uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Pareto principle (Wikipedia) | Value concentrates: a minority of the work carries most of the payoff | Breadth beats depth; firsts before seconds on Rank |
| Hofstadter's law (Wikipedia) | It always takes longer than you expect, even accounting for this law (Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979) | Plan the top half; the triage's estimates-doubled test |
| Ninety-ninety rule (Wikipedia) | The last 10 % of the work costs the other 90 % of the time (Cargill, Bell Labs; Bentley's CACM column, 1985) | The definition of done; why un-joined work is not progress on Rhythm |
| Regression testing (Wikipedia) | Changes break distant things; re-running what worked is how you find out in time | Station 4 of the daily loop; the minutes-now-or-Monday economics |
| Technical debt (Wikipedia) | Cunningham's 1992 metaphor: expedient code is borrowing, and interest accrues until the rewrite | Journal it, don't chase it; the DEBT line format on Rhythm |
| Freeze (software engineering) (Wikipedia) | After a point, change rules tighten so that what is known to work keeps working | The risk curve, the allowed/banned lists, the runway on Freeze |
The course's own shelf
The week leans on pages already written, and they are the right reference at the bench: the project workflow for the repo spine, tags and the verification-table format; the evaluation page for the demo-slot protocol the rehearsals practise; the risk patterns for the failure modes this week's symptom table instantiates; Week 12 entire for skeletons, integration order, half-splitting and services; Week 5 for the requirement qualities the table's rows depend on; and Week 13's D3 page, where this week's ranked list and freeze date were set. Subsystem references, when a fix needs one, live on the project hub's shelf, gathered by layer.