Return to ZeroDiff¶

After a near decade-long break, I've returned to ZeroDiff with a new perspective: it isn't just for hardware, it's a universal approach to product design and iteration. When we got clobbered in 2016 I needed a break, so I became a contractor with a focus on cloud compute, systems programming and data systems. I shaped that work into a what I thought might be a startup, Karrots, but with two kids in college I needed to give everyone a couple years break from startup stress and grind.

Eventually I want to return to robots and hardware, but because my life these days is mostly systems software at scale, I want to share some of the way that I have applied ZeroDiff to software over the years. The goal now is to run more formal experiments and write about them.

The fundamental driver to my thinking is a concept I call "the inventory cost of a git commit." I will write more deeply about this in the future, but the basic idea is the same as hardware: git commits are like inventory, until you ship them, they generate no economic value, so the carrying cost is the same as it is for hardware. Lowering inventory carrying costs improves the operational cash cycle which makes it possible to get more done with the same capital. This idea applies to BigCo as much as any startup, and to software as much as hardware — it's a universal concept. I want to show that ZeroDiff is a way to make hardware and software businesses leaner and meaner.

Stay tuned.