Several times over my career I’ve been in places with legacy management styles that plain do not understand software development at all. And I am always told this by those businesses: “Software development is just a skill.” Its always by people who have never been a developer in their lives at all. They almost always […]
A little while ago a good friend architect of mine told me about a crazy over-engineered project he was working on; the application had two or more caching mechanisms, and took over a week for a new developer to get onboard. At a gig I had last year (and I’ve written about this) I worked […]
Many years ago I was working on a website and I had to do some image manipulation for the graphics. The company I was working at wouldn’t let me get a copy of Photoshop or anything close to install on my computer — if you installed anything out of bounds the monitoring service on your […]
This kept coming up from several of my colleagues at my current gig, at some other sites and then touched me this week. Its, working without a mission. Or a work statement. If you read some management sites, or about human nature in general, human nature seems to be motivated on the need to be […]
Do you know what this is? It’s called a Chadburn, or an Engine Order Telegraph. I don’t know if they make these things too much anymore, maybe they do. You can see a bunch of them if you visit the Queen Mary, or maybe ride the riverboats Mississipi Queen or Becky Thatcher. A […]
I’m currently consulting on a project and got one of those classic “consultant workstation” spots to sit at. Cramped legs and a very, very high traffic area sitting next to customer support people wearing headsets. Also what had been happening is that people were also taking liberties with our row’s personal articles (pens, papers, chairs […]
About every month or so, no matter where I am, someone comes to me and says: “well, we are going to take you off this project. I hope its in a place to be taken over by someone else. We are going to use you somewhere else.” Then walks away. From a management or product […]
I honestly think that a lot of this “agile speak” has gotten too big for its britches. I’m seeing an interesting trend where management consultants who won’t work with small organizations are talking about scalable Agile. These people aren’t developers, probably never were, and are getting inside the build box and making things, well, krufty. […]
I’ve been working a little on some SEO at work and learning quite a bit with our resident expert. It’s kind of funny because I’ve written SEO pieces for a few apps (metadata, deep linking, canonical pieces, under webs etc.) and still as a developer its a whole practice, like doing cms/edm, or service buses, […]
A long time ago I was in one of those corporate rah-rah training programs that dealt with teamwork. One of the exercises was putting together a difficult puzzle as an individual while team members watched, knowing the solution, but could not help you at all. One particular person we got to watch absolutely could not […]