Things Mark Stringer Has Said on Podcasts

“Organizations are set up to deal with biscuit tins. They're not set up to deal with biscuits.” — Mark Stringer, Maintainable

Stringer, who studied philosophy, on the gap between software and descriptions of software: the tin carries a nice picture and a description, and the biscuit is a different thing. Descriptions can be produced quickly and don't go stale; the software itself needs looking after, which he says still holds in the age of vibe coding.

Maintainable · 2026-10-27 Permalink → Listen →

Maintainable Around 39:22 into the episode

Mark Stringer

…book is about. So the first kind of however many chapters, I don't know, six or seven chapters are kind of like helpful, useful ways of seeing software development. And then there are four or five chapters about unhelpful and painful ways of looking at software development and project management.

robby russell

Do you feel like you there's something about how you approach project management in the software development lifecycle that is very atypical and is maybe part of your secret sauce?

Mark Stringer

…the biscuit have any kind of connection with the biscuit? How can this thing that's a description of the biscuit, which when you think about what descriptions are, they're kind of patterns on a page or they're noises or they're kind of like some visual things. How can that have any connection with actual biscuits? And one of the things that I kind of I realized when I was writing my book is organizations are set up to deal with biscuit tins. They're not set up to deal with biscuits. And I had this kind of revelation. I was reading a book. I am not a mathematician, so I'm not entirely sure why I was reading this book. I was reading a book on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. And I wouldn't like to have to explain what Gödel's incompleteness theorem is. But one of the things they said in there was that numbers and descriptions of numbers exist on, they use the word substrate.…

robby russell

problem with that to the top.

Mark Stringer

And so, kind of like the understanding, because most organizations just talk in descriptions, they don't talk in actual things. And so, one of the things I was saying earlier is you have to get the biscuits to the people who want to eat the biscuits. And then, once you've done that, then you can…

robby russell

I'm digesting that, Mark. And I could go for a batch of biscuits right now as well. Some digestives in particular, like the chocolate ones. I'm like a really big fan of hobnobs. Let's take a moment for the teams running Ruby apps. If your test coverage says 90%, there's a decent chance it's lying…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

“If you have people who aren't technical and they say, well, we need this for Christmas… They don't think that they're saying, could you just do a really kind of slipshod job? … They sort of think they're saying something like, could you just type really fast? The quality will still be the same, but you just have entered it much quicker.” — Mark Stringer, Maintainable

Stringer, a longtime software project manager, says he used to fight deadlines and now treats them like gravity. The job is to get as much value out of a deadline as possible while doing as little damage as possible, and that starts with explaining what a rushed date actually asks for.

Maintainable · 2026-10-27 Permalink → Listen →

Maintainable Around 06:07 into the episode

Mark Stringer

…Because we tried to do it for Christmas or we tried to do it overnight or etc. So that's a kind of organizational mismatch between what can actually be done in a particular time, for example, and what is quick and easy to do versus what would be maintainable in the actual software that's written.

robby russell

…in the sense like there's like these peak periods where everybody's hunkered down, focused on some initiatives or this is, we got to get things ready before this big conference we go to every year. There's these like little things that like cultural ceremonies in a way that organizations have.

Mark Stringer

…damage as possible at the same time. And this is something that kind of I find absolutely astounding is that if you have people who aren't technical and they say, well, we need this for Christmas, and that's clearly ambitious in Inverted Commerce as a deadline. They don't think that they're saying, could you just do a really kind of slipshod job? They don't think that's what they're saying. They sort of think they're saying something like, could you just type really fast? The quality will still be the same, but you just have entered it much quicker. And that is something that, I mean, sometimes that, you know, you can explain and say, like, you know, by stating it in this way, that you've just asked for something that will be of poor quality and we need to go back and fix it later. But also the other thing is, like, you know, I think a lot of developers just won't do that. They won't do the thing that is the quick and slipshod way of doing…

robby russell

Do you think that when those conversations do or do not happen where there's like someone setting a milestone or a deadline, okay, we get this done before Christmas break, what have you? And the developers are like, all right, well, in order for us to do this, we're going to have to make some…

Mark Stringer

I mean, obviously that happens all the time. And that kind of that conversation doesn't work very well. I think kind of one of the things that I'm kind of working, trying to work towards when I'm kind of working on projects is to start. I mean, one of the phrases I have for this is like, you know…

robby russell

That's a great one.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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