August 2009

The Manager’s Manager

August 30, 2009

The most important person in your professional life is the person who your manager is beholden to. In a large organization, it is simple to identify this person: it is your manager’s manager. In a smaller company, it could be a C‐level person or a customer. You see, the thing is that your manager is […]

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Why Developers Say, “It Works On My System”

August 28, 2009

Because it is not as bad as saying, “Don’t blame me for it.” “It works on my computer” is one of those things that reminds me of how pedestrians behave as drivers and vice versa. The pedestrian feels that the driver should be careful and drive safely, but the same person, as a driver, hates […]

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Zero Defect Software

August 27, 2009

Tim Barcz has an interesting post about striving for software with zero defects: I think we should not shy away from holding ourselves to an excessively high standard.  Frankly, I’m more familiar with how to do it as a developer having years of building software to gain knowledge and experience from.  I don’t have all […]

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Guy Kawasaki’s Engineer Lies

August 26, 2009

Guy Kawasaki had a series of posts where he called out various types of people (venture capitalists, engineers, marketers, etc.) on untrue things that they are used to saying. There are situations when using a tough word is appropriate, but this is one case where Kawasaki is just wrong. Most people are truthful most of the […]

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The Stupidity Threshold

August 25, 2009

Alan Skorkin has a good post about how people tend to use concepts like YAGNI and TDD to justify whatever they are doing, instead of thinking about what they are doing: Every practice you use, including TDD and YAGNI has a certain threshold which I call the stupidity threshold. While you’re using the practice as […]

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Book Shelves

August 24, 2009

Rands has a great essay on why he loves books and about how he stalks the books in the house of a new acquaintance. It brought back some fond childhood memories when I would raid the comic books at the houses of my friends: Tintin, Asterix, Amar Chitra Katha, Archie and so on. Even today, […]

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Book Review: Young Guns, by Robert Tuchman

August 23, 2009

I recently had a chance to read “Young Guns”, a semi‐autobiographical book about entrepreneurship by Robert Tuchman. Usually, such books make one fundamental mistake, which is to try to be “inspirational” and make inaccurate sweeping claims. But Tuchman avoids this by getting more detail‐oriented and explaining the tough choices faced by entrepreneurs. Whether intentional or not, […]

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Bad Example for Test‐Driven Development

August 13, 2009

Uncle Bob has a point with respect to “generic code and specific tests”, but the example he gives for supporting his argument (“Prime Factors Kata”) is a poor one. In fact, it supports the argument against Test‐Driven Development, which is that it pays too little attention to design and that design is an after‐thought of […]

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Anecdotes and Data

August 6, 2009

Joshua Porter had a good post on over‐relying on anecdotes: We take shortcuts, we tell anecdotes, instead of looking at the data. In the design world this happens all the time. People extrapolate from their own experience or stories they’ve heard about using the web, generalize it, and share it with others. That’s how anecdotes […]

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The Ugliest Part of MVC

August 4, 2009

All the mainstream technologies have converged towards MVC as the primary architecture for web development. One major holdout was ASP.NET WebForms, but that will decline in time with ASP.NET MVC gaining more popularity. This is a good thing for the industry as it will help programmers move to another platform as the general concepts are […]

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