You set a goal, pack your bags, board the train, and the only variable between you and your goal is the speed of the train. Unless the whole thing derails, you end up where you were planning on going.

Unfortunately software development is more like hitchhiking:

You set some general goals (somewhere sunny), pack your bags and after that where you end up depends on a whole lot of variables: who will pick you up and where will they be heading too? Along the ride your goals can change at every turn. You might end up pretty close to your goal but the further you are planning on traveling the greater the chances that you won’t.

I do and have learned to accept it as a warning sign.

‘That will do’ means you are about to deliver something below par. If you find yourself about to walk away from a job that seems just good enough you should stop yourself and think about what you could add to turn your job from ‘That will do’ into ‘This is it!’.

The ‘quick fix’ is seldon a real fix, the ‘Good enough’ solution is never good enough and ‘that will do’ never does.

The original article can be read here, in Dutch.

Right now we are preparing ourselves for the 4th edition of The Next Web Conference. We expect close to a 1000 participants this year which means we will have to work harder than ever before. We have a great line-up of international speakers and great events planned. Now all we have to do is make sure everyone is where they are supposed to be when the time (April 15, 16 and 17) comes.

To promote the event I used the technology we developed for TwitterCounter to design a few buttons that show a countdown until the event. Displayed on the right here is one example:

This one shows a different background color each time you reload it and counts down until the conference. They are very visible and attract a lot of visitors from the blogs where they are displayed.

Feel free to copy this button (or any of the other ones) and show it on your blog too. All marketing efforts help!

If you haven’t reserved your ticket yet now might be a good time. Hope to see you all in Amsterdam soon!

More information at Bowlr.nl

My guess (and experience) isn’t that people run out of inspiration or things to write about. I think the reason they stop blogging is because of the Hiatuses Increasing Aversion Effect.

This is how it works; let assume you post 3 articles, every day. Then you miss a day or two. Instinctively you feel that your next post should make up for the lost posts and better be pretty interesting. This raises the bar for your next post so you decide to think about it for an extra day. The next day you want to post something again but this time you have an even greater responsibility to write a good post! And the longer you wait, the higher you feel the expectations will be. In other words: The Hiatuses Increasing Aversion Effect.

Guess I overcame that one…