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I’ve been thinking lately of a problem that constantly seems to hit a lot of IT projects (and probably other projects) in the face. Basically, how to make the basic assumptions and done decisions most efficiently known throughout the team.

For example, if the lead developer or architect decides that a component called “engine” needs to do only thing A and B, nothing else, and he thinks that if anyone, ever, wants it to make C, they always need to understand the original rational for limiting the functionality to A and B, before making the decision to add C.

Problems like this can become tedious in larger organizations because many people only typically know that the “engine” exists, but nothing else. Without knowing the context and basic assumptions made when the original decision to keep the functionality to the bare minimum, that is, only to have A and B in the engine, many people waste a lot of time and effort to design stuff without complete information.

Clearly, traditional approach, meaning documentation and learning, is quite slow and inefficient. Worse yet, collective documentation and collective learning are even slower. People constantly are misaligned with their documentation and with the stuff they have learned.

Nevertheless, I think I have found out at least few items that can make this better and I hopefully can pursue them in the near future. Please let me know if you are interested in this topic, I’m surely going to need help.

Now that our daughter is starting to move by herself more, the nights have gotten more restless. On average I think that I barely get 5 to 6 hours of sleep per night and surely my wife gets a lot less. By all standards this is not enough.

I do know that lack of sleep causes a lot of problems, apart from general bad feeling, that is. Basically weight control becomes problematic, learning and general cognitive capabilities are affected, one is more prone to accident and so forth. Depression being one that I fear the most. I am perhaps not the most cheerful person but I have been also quite far from depressed. I have now started to see the tell-tale signs of sleep deprivation in myself and it’s really worrying.

I would like to believe that this is only temporary, but I would like to know if there’s any academic research being done of young children’s parents and their sleep. Are we above or below the average? What’s the mean age, in months, when an average baby starts to really sleep full nights. Don’t know how much the information would be worth to me since the variance is probably quite high, but it would be interesting to read the stats.

And like always, it’s not the absolute amount, it’s the relative amount when comparing to others that matters. It does not feel so bad if everyone else is in the same boat.