March 2009

The Risks of Providing Negative Feedback

March 30, 2009

An important part of management and mentoring is the need to provide accurate feedback to employees about their work. The motivation is to reinforce positive actions and behaviors and reduce or end mistakes. It is easy to give praise to employees when they are doing something good, but the flip side has many risks. The main […]

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Why Ideology is Bad

March 30, 2009

Daniel Larison writes: (it is in a different context, but relevant nevertheless) ideology will not reliably predict consequences of events, but it will condition the mind to force every event into the mold provided by the ideology. If a person approaches the world with an ideological frame of mind, whatever events dominate the historical memory […]

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What is the Value of a Programmer’s Time?

March 24, 2009

In my post on BizSpark, I suggested that while $1 in hard cash can be considered equivalent to $1 in programmer effort, practically they are quite different. There are a few different situations around this, so let me try to explain them here. For the sake of this discussion, let me use some round numbers, […]

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Interview with Mike Ramm

March 23, 2009

My friend and project management writer, Mike Ramm, from Bulgaria, was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work and his ideas on project management. Could you please give an introduction to yourself and your online work for our readers? I started my career twenty years ago as a software developer and my […]

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Crisis Management is not Project Management

March 18, 2009

In the last few months, I had the misfortune of attending speeches where the talker took a fascinating subject about a real-life crisis and then went about brutally twisting the facts to fit into a project management paradigm. Without naming names, let me say it went something like “How to Manage Your Project by Learning […]

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What does “Non-Commercial” in Creative Commons Mean?

March 17, 2009

The Creative Commons license has different attributes, one of which is “Non-Commercial”. It simply states “You may not use this work for commercial purposes.” The literal reading makes it very clear you cannot profit directly from the work, such as selling it as part of an image library. But what if you are using it […]

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BizSpark is Not Good Enough to Depose LAMP

March 16, 2009

Microsoft has a program for startups called “BizSpark” that offers Microsoft development and production licenses with the following terms: (via StackOverflow blog) No fees to join Access to as many production Microsoft product licenses as you need, for free, for three years MSDN Professional full access subscription to download the software At the end of three years you […]

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Interview with Jurgen Appelo on the Complex Manifesto

March 15, 2009

I was fascinated with Jurgen Appelo’s post proposing a new “Complex Manifesto” because it was able to explain with clarity why we have to think deeper when we read software experts talk about various principles and practices. I requested him to answer a few questions on the topic and he was very kind to agree […]

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Don’t be Too Quick to Judge

March 14, 2009

Sometimes, people can be too clever by half. When it comes to knowledge of understanding other people, everybody thinks they are an expert. They think they can understand the motivations of others based on one or two interactions when, in fact, they are drawing upon stereotypes and are making wrongful assumptions. People who are quick […]

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Thoughts on Randy Pausch

March 12, 2009

I will be posting more on Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” in a different post, but before that, I wanted to talk about the context in which his lecture takes place. Taken by itself, the speech is very inspiring and has many thought-provoking ideas. (You can skip the book which is too much process, too […]

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