221. Spolsky's Maxim & Starting from Scratch
Channel: THUNK
Date: 2022-03-14

Sometimes, it feels like the best way forward on a project is to throw everything out & start over from scratch, but Joel Spolsky is adamant that this is a terrible idea, & there’s decent evidence that he’s right.

- Links for the Curious -

Things You Should Never Do, Part 1 (Spolsky, 2000) - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

Conservatism in Laboratory Microsocieties: Unpredictable Payoffs Accentuate Group-Specific Traditions (Caldwell & Millen, 2010) - https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/2120/1/Caldwell2010EHB.pdf 

Variable Cultural Acquisition Costs Constrain Cumulative Cultural Evolution (Mesoudi, 2011) - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0018239

Identifying innovation in laboratory studies of cultural evolution: rates of retention and measures of adaptation (Caldwell et al, 2016) - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0193

“The Thing,” by GK Chesterton - https://d2y1pz2y630308.cloudfront.net/15471/documents/2016/10/G.K.Chesterton-The%20Thing.pdf

Knowledge Waste In Organizations: A Review Of Previous Studies - https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a539/609c2dc7e3ec9fe22c6dee9a475392462043.pdf  

Not Invented Here (Kim, 1982) - https://www.academia.edu/download/58808970/NotInventedHere.pdf 

Chronological Snobbery:  Has our ever-changing world changed us for the better? (Jorgenson, 2017) - https://www.theodysseyonline.com/chronological-snobbery


Why reinventing the wheels? An empirical study on library reuse and re-implementation (Xu et al, 2019) - https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5503&context=sis_research 

The Myth of the Software Rewrite (Dietrich, 2020) - https://daedtech.com/the-myth-of-the-software-rewrite/ 

How Stephen Jay Gould wrote Macbeth—Not giving credit where it’s due: lazy referencing and ignoring precedence (Leather, 2014) - https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/IEE/article/download/5266/pdf_8 

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture (Osiuraka & Reynaud, 2020) - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53485734e4b0fffc0dcc64c2/t/60196dc347036c7c0fee478c/1612279238248/the-social-side-of-innovation.pdf 

Innovation as a neoliberal ‘silver bullet’: critical reflections on
the EU’s Erasmus + Key Action 2 (Ord, 2020)- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jon-Ord-2/publication/343824805_Innovation_as_a_neoliberal_'silver_bullet'_critical_reflections_on_the_EU's_Erasmus_Key_Action_2/links/61f91af311a1090a79c79ecd/Innovation-as-a-neoliberal-silver-bullet-critical-reflections-on-the-EUs-Erasmus-Key-Action-2.pdf

Lots Of Candidates Want To Simplify Tax Code; Here's What They Get Wrong (Kurtzleben, 2015) - https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/09/28/443203910/lots-of-candidates-want-to-simplify-the-tax-code-heres-what-they-get-wrong

How to Improve Technology - Abandon Your Codebase - https://youtu.be/qfICBICGh18

Reinventing the Wheel: Examining the Antecedents, Moderators,
and Outcomes of the Innovation Process (Smothers, 2012) - https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1267&context=etd