Thursday, December 10, 2009
From the Google I/O 2009 conference:
“A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We’ll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and [...]
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
There seems to be something about programming that makes software engineers seek the perfect solution to a given problem or design brief.
Something that drives them to keep adding things to their program or library until they kill it with love for example Microsoft Word has a gazillion features but until recently (its has improved a [...]
Friday, September 12, 2008
Here is an interesting exercise for you to try next time your estimating something e.g, task duration.
Write down your initial off the cuff estimation, without thinking about the estimation in any detail.
Think some more about the task and how long it could take if everything went wrong (within reason e.g, discounting riots, natural disasters, coups [...]
Monday, September 8, 2008
We’ve all been there, working away trying to solve some an implementation issue or design detail and suddenly realise we’ve been browsing the web or the building, chatting with co-workers for no reason, surfing the email inbox, going for over-long breaks or otherwise avoiding the task at hand. The most likely diagnosis? You are either [...]
Friday, September 5, 2008
I thought I’d put together my list of essential items for any software developer:
Text editor
As word processors, type writers and stationary are to journalists, so text editors (e.g, CodeWright, Scite, VI, EMACS or Visual Studio) are for programmers: the tools closest to our hearts. They are the main way we interact with our medium [...]