Musings of a Software Development Manager

Turns out for me Wednesdays are a good day for one-on-ones. Until recently I had been running weekly one-on-ones with my ten or so direct reports across Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. One-on-ones have really improved my relationship with my employees and vice versa. Problems are detected and corrected sooner, even really quiet team members get [...]

I shuddered reading this post: After months of using Eclipse, of being forced to use Eclipse, I decided I just can’t continue down this path any longer. Like a burglar in the dead of night, or a drug smuggler on the border, I committed a most sinful and most treacherous act — I installed IntelliJ [...]

Jef Raskin suggests comments are more important that code (via a link from Raganwald). Like test first design, you should try out comment first design: A competent programmer who has learned the documentation-first style will sometimes think of a solution in terms of code, write that first, and then document, or will apply a mixed [...]

In the last two years of using Scrum on projects the Sprint Backlog was: Excel Spreadsheets: 6 Task Boards: 4 Spreadsheets are winning. Our environment is a medium sized financial services company with independent projects. We don’t have Scrum of Scrums or any need for them at this point. Everyone is located on-site with the [...]

Google Developer Day was a good experience for a free event. It’s always nice to see how software development shops go out of their way to make for happy developers. There were plenty of good snacks, bean bag chairs, reasonable wireless, a foosball table and pool table. I snagged two pretty nice T-shirts and they [...]