josh_rosenblum's comments

Default cases can be helpful. Unfortunately, with generated serdes (as in Thrift, Avro, or Protobufs), you may not have control over the decoding or ability to customize the default case. For some of the details WRT Thrift in particular, there's a related discussion underway on the user mailing list now:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/thrift-user/201311....

One of the signaling effects this may have is that your corporate identity has built up re-usable processes, code libraries, infrastructure, and other IP. This itself can be useful both as a signal and practically. If you can talk about the corporate identity having processes in place -- even something as simple as a repeatable process for escrowing code -- this can be something that a potential client can lock onto versus a "freelancer" with no repeatable process. It may be an irrational bias, but I'd be willing to bet that most prospects would be more willing to ascribe repeatability and predictability (a key point in evaluating service providers, no matter the scale of the job) to a corporate identity than to a personal identity.

Liked this point. The notion of a budget frontier and the boundary it defines is really helpful for design decisions of any sort. There are always limits, whether that's time, money, CPU cycles, IO bandwidth, or any other resource. I remember that one of my early econ instructors defined economics as the study of decision-making under limited resources. (Of course, many other disciplines could be defined similarly!)