This is why you can't ship quality products. You must understand this Fundamental Law first.

The fundamental principle revealed in this letter will explain why I had dozens of unpublished written nerd letters and products I never released.

Paradoxical is the same reason I already released my third SaaS (that failed, by the way), and I'm publishing everything I think and reflect on even when most of my written thoughts I know are still imperfect.

Unbelievably, I wrote part of this letter in 2016; a few days back, I found it in a folder of unpublished stuff. I had to rewrite it since it was written in Spanish (my primary language).

The exciting principle you will discover after you read this letter is that the same reason that made me fail at publishing it is the same force that made me publish it today.

The Uncertainty Principle.

In 2016, I read this Inc. article (luckily, the link still works) that exposed me for the first time to the Uncertainty Principle; this principle affects everything at quantum levels and as a consequence:

Your thoughts, your actions, your company, your systems, your code, everything.

The Uncertainty Principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics that, at its core, explains:

You can't know everything about a particle at the same time.

You can find beautiful explanations (here, and?here) about the underlying truth that hides this physical concept, but in this letter, I will remind you of just a few crucial points.

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Some specific pairs of properties are complementary and linked by this fundamental law; the better you know one property, the less precise your knowledge of the other becomes. The more precisely you try to measure one, the more uncertainty the other becomes. We all live in an uncertain reality but don’t think probabilistically.

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Understanding science will give you freedom.

I only sometimes believed that science had the answer to mostly all questions, but Michio Kaku and other scientists convinced me years back.

The implicit problem today for us computer scientists and software engineers is that we don’t have time to think effectively, not even to ask the right questions; we are worried about the next language to learn and the next feature to release, so as a consequence, we end up mindlessly following the latest hot topic trend raised on the internet.

Understanding science and knowing the world survive under fundamental principles that do not change gives you freedom.

When you finish reading this letter, you will not be impressed by those SCRUM cultists measuring every sprint and backlog story and talking about planning with such precision, enterprises that release unnecessary features (often named feature factory companies), and engineers that do not create the next generational product because of fear or the absence of probabilistic thinking.

The underlying truth in this article remains alive, and we can dig deeper to its core on how technology has been affected. Still, I want to avoid the philosophical explanation in this letter.

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Our world is a probabilistic sea.

This profound truth about the universe makes your world, my world, a probabilistic sea that we must learn to navigate effectively.

Years back, uncertainty scared me, and to be honest, sometimes it still does, but now I understand this law; I know we are affected by waves that, by nature, give our paths uncertain and unpredictable outcomes.

As a result, I write and publish more; I encourage teams to release faster and more often; I don’t believe in accurate planning, I don’t blindless believe in metrics, and I understand that most companies and engineers will not embrace uncertainty.

Even when history has shown many times that the future is forged only by those who understand science and overload their lives with a “lot of doing” without caring too much for accuracy, measuring, or uncertainty.