Blog strategy

About how we work and blog post updating

Building a new product in a new domain is not an easy task, and things do not happen with beautiful first-time right architectures, designs and implementations. As we want to give a true account of how it evolves into a working product, expect some mis-information, wrong conclusions and sometimes first-time clumsy implementations because that is to be expected in the chronology of the system’s development. The idea is to get it right at the end – in the shortest possible development time (given the authors’ available time to work on the project).

At the project level (how to successfully finish a project), a rigid sequential process is – of course – impossible under these conditions:

We follow a lean and iterative engineering process.

This allows us to cycle fast yet in a structured way.

At the development level (how to make the best architectural and design decisions):

We prefer to mix top-down and bottom-up approaches.

“Top-down” provides us with a structured and logical architecture given the – at that moment – attained domain knowledge.

“Bottom-up” will be needed to demonstrate or prove possible solutions to low-level problems. That newly attained knowledge is then fed back into the top-down analysis.

The “fog” is slowly clearing up

That means that early architectures and logic designs will evolve, blog posts about high level architectural stuff will be intermixed with blog posts about experimental fiddling on technological building blocks. Work on top-down and bottom-up items is happening simultaneously. Moreover, they influence each other. But don’t get confused: all work is executed in the broader context of the engineering process which guides our development. We’ll do our best to clarify this context.

We commit ourselves to update the project situation and the blog – with a new posted item – at least once a week. In order to do that in a practical manner, we have a few weeks head-start on our readers: back into the future so-to-speak. We need that buffer to absorb work load ‘shocks’ and other consultancy work. Of course, it makes also sense to (try to) review articles before they are posted so that the most ridiculous stuff is filtered out (we hope :-)), but there will still be lots of entertaining and naive misconceptions to be read. Of course, we will update the facts as we verify them with experiments and new insights.

We hope you will have as much fun … and enlightenment reading about it, as we ( will be having / had )  designing, developing and building it.