Musings of a Software Development Manager

I realized today that I’m #152 on a list of the top blogs for developers. Jurgen Appelo (NOOP.NL) has been compiling lists like these for a bit now and this humble little effort manages to do pretty well. Jurgen himself has made a great effort to put out quality content on a regular [...]

I’m now part of 11.5% of all California workers looking for work. My organization decided strategically that they didn’t want to do in-house development, hence they didn’t need a development manager. I just wish I had gotten a longer chance to show the significant quality and cost benefits of maintaining a development team [...]

I’ve heard about git and decentralized version control systems like Mercurial for a few years. Conceptually it sounded interesting, but not compelling. Over the years I’ve used the following version control systems:

No version control – a very early web startup around 1994. I was blissfully unaware of version control at this [...]

As a development manager I relished reading Martin Fowler’s description of values at ThoughtWorks:

Leveraging bright people over Making the most of moderate people
Flexible career paths over Well-defined roles
Delivering business value over Leading edge research
Learning new technologies over Mastering established technologies
Solving difficult problems over Increasing market share
Learning from mistakes over Avoidance of taking risks
Delivery to the [...]