It's slightly unclear whether the OP is talking about risk assessment and reducing unknown unknowns, or simply advocating becoming more well-rounded in your problem domain.
Also, I would argue there's much more to consider before offhandedly determining anything you don't know "is the riskiest part of your business". The real answer probably lies in the question: Can I hire somebody to do this, or is it important enough to distract us from other goals? If yes then do it, otherwise reconsider when resources free up.
The trouble is not making the vaccine. As soon as you have the virus you can make the vaccine. The trouble is that we currently lack the capacity to rapidly produce large quantities of the vaccine.
Why do we lack the capacity? Because there's no profit in making flu vaccines! Gotta love capitalism, eh?
Edit: I did find this article which mentions new vaccines being more profitable (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc200...), so perhaps the market is not as bleak as I had thought. Still, I worry about things as vital as vaccine and antibiotic manufacture being left to the whims of the market (new antibiotics are, last I checked, still not profitable).
As opposed to the whims of a government bureaucracy? Large amounts of the "antibiotics" and other drugs available in the Soviet Union were saline solution, sterile saline if you were lucky. Do you really think any other dictatorial (ie, government run) system wouldn't sink to that state eventually?
I don't recall saying anything about government run... On the contrary, I find it equally sad that given all the creativity that people exercise in designing ways for me to talk about what I had for lunch, all we can think of for motivating production is market economics or government bureaucracy. There is obvious demand but it is too volatile for the market to capture efficiently and often those with greatest demand are also those with the least means. Perhaps there needs to be some sort of population amortized vaccine/antibiotic futures market?
Money aside, it's great you've created an awesome product for a group that really could use more assistance. Thanks for building something to better the human condition, and showing others they don't need to sacrifice everything to do it!
Fellow "serial over committer" here. I find it preferable to accept all new opportunities, but make sure stakeholders/I understand my availability. After prioritizing, nobody's surprised when some projects complete and others don't gain momentum. If you're letting others down, they probably overestimated your time/resources.
Having used it for a while now, I'm still blown away by how simple (yet effective) it is for getting tasks done. I wish I could escape the world of email, Fogbugz, and Pivotal Tracker... and bring everyone with me to Orchestra. Congrats on the great coverage, hope my wish becomes realized!
Great article, though I would take it one step further and strongly nudge more designers to take on more engineering roles (as many engineers also work to broaden their skill set).
Will Miner spoke about web designer as a hybrid between designer and developer at Build: http://vimeo.com/7835308
I feel like I’ll probably be a designer at heart, but I still want to learn as much dev-stuff as possible. I’m going to use Django for my personal portfolio, simply for the sake of learning it. I’m really looking forward to it. :)
Generally people need people of other disciplines. Developers need designers as well, and we all need copywriters for instance.
You know, after 2 failed upgrade attempts to Rails 3... we eventually came to the understanding that we shouldn't attempt to simultaneously make "improvements". Because without a green test suite, we had no idea if the failures were new or upgrade related. That was the cause of 99% of worry until we said "fuck it, let's just fix everything first."
My revelation came from more simpler stuff. I was programming some service at work, and as usual there were a lot of bugs. I tend to worry a lot during programming about corner cases etc. I analyzed myself analyzing, and thought may be this is what a computer should do, which is inline with an earlier epiphany that "It is cardinal sin of a developer to do himself what a computer can do".
Now I tend not to worry about corner cases etc while programming. I just write all the stuff I can, and write tests for all the stuff that could possibly go wrong. And let the computer figure out the bugs for me :). It somewhat reminds me of Prolog.
While I love this is FOSS, there's is a $1 paid-app that is almost entirely 1:1 with the Snow Leopard (plus features) called "Classic Color Picker". Totally worth it IMO.
Also, I would argue there's much more to consider before offhandedly determining anything you don't know "is the riskiest part of your business". The real answer probably lies in the question: Can I hire somebody to do this, or is it important enough to distract us from other goals? If yes then do it, otherwise reconsider when resources free up.