Archive for the ‘Managing Software Projects’ Category

I gave a talk to 30 local software developers last Wednesday, on the top risks in software projects and what to do about them. We recorded the event and the video can be found here.

The Bad Habits of Project Management event yesterday was a smashing success. Thank-you to everyone who was a part of it. Local community member An-Min Kuo has a summary and a Flickr stream of the event.

I just read a brilliant and well illustrated piece on the evolution of software product design. It takes you from the days of a lonely programmer with a technical problem to solve for themselves or possibly another buddy programmer, all the way through commercial product development. Check out this great storyboard for the gist of [...]

I’ve spent the last quarter re-designing the user interface for the Devshop product. The new design will be out in a couple months. During this process, I spent practically the whole year with my eyes wide open, looking for and noticing little cues to good industrial design along the way. I’d keep a list of [...]

Work to live or live to work? Do you consider yourself to have a job or a career? The answer to these questions can tell you a lot about a person. Too bad you can’t just blurt them out and ask them directly while interviewing someone because it’s too easy to see what the interviewer [...]

Seth Godin has a short but very insightful post on the difference between a workaholic… A workaholic lives on fear. It’s fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record. … and the “passionate worker”: The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of [...]

A friend and I were talking about how sometimes in a small company, it feels like you move at a snail’s pace due to a shortage of hands, minds & bodies. He was wondering about the possibility of chopping things up and outsourcing certain parts of the product in order to move the whole thing [...]

I love the Boolean data type. True or False. Those are your choices. Nowadays, almost every programming language implements them the same. C is the only language I can remember that’s still in use, that has some extra ambiguities because True and False are actually constants that evaluate to 1 or 0 respectively. So craziness [...]

Mention the word Agile to anyone in software development and you’re likely to get a strong reaction. The person will either jump down your throat if you even merely hint at suggesting at implying that it may not be absolutely, completely and without a doubt the most perfect way to manage a project EVER (blessed [...]