A message to my amazing Rocket Partners team…

From a technical perspective, I will be the first to admit that the demands of our clients don’t always make sense. Our clients, after all, are usually not rational nerds. They are humans.  While we battle code, they battle budgets and politics in one of the most complex, inefficient, perilous social structures humanity has ever created: corporate America.

When we are faced with the daunting and illogical, it can be easy to become callous. When today’s requirements feel unsatisfiable, we can easily lose touch with the long-term vision of what it means to provide our clients with world-class service. We will never do that.

Yesterday, I received notification from our IP attorneys that one of our trademark applications for our Open Source Inversion API Engine had been approved by the USPTO. You may have noticed it in the Inversion README or in the banner on bootup. “Create More. Code Less.”

To me, “Create More. Code Less.” is not just a hopefully catchy slogan. It is an antidote to the ordinary. It is an organizing principle. It is a vision. It is my mission for Rocket Partners and the theme that I want to underlie the amazing work each of you does for our clients every day.

Some of today’s pundits say that you should not worry about your application architecture because the people who come after you will not invest in understanding it and will work around it no matter what. On somewhat the opposite end of the spectrum, Larry Ellison, of Oracle fame, is often quoted as saying that it takes 10 years to build good software. Experience has taught me that there is truth in both of these positions. What I know for sure is that the solutions we build for our clients today will be in production FAR longer than you might think. I expect a Rocket Partners solution to adapt gracefully to new requirements and future generations of developers, consultants, and client stakeholders. This means we must always consider what lies beyond the immediacy of a specific requirement.

This message is a mandate to each of you to always consider, explore, discuss, and challenge why and how we deliver value to our clients. Helping each other to discover, invent, and deliver excellence in software consulting is our collective job.