Musings of a Software Development Manager

I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers:

All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily.
Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant)
All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson)
All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding standards.
Unit test coverage of [...]

Not too long ago a local recruiter noted at a JUG meeting:
“I don’t care what else you have on your resume, but you have to have Spring and Hibernate. I know it was all EJB and SOA just a few years ago, but now if you don’t have Spring/Hibernate you’re not getting past [...]

I know you wonder why developers come charging into the help desk right after you’ve delivered the sparkling new machine with 8GB of RAM, dual monitors and a quad core processor. They start babbling about how they need admin access or you might as well give them there old Pentium 4 box so they [...]

Land the Tech Job You Love turned out to be a good read full of actionable advice for job seekers who just happen to be techies. It covers everything from creating three versions of your resume to preparing a portfolio of work products to take with you to the interview. All of this [...]

As a hiring manager the world has gotten easier with respect to getting some independent information on a given developer candidate. For many years now I’ve taken to doing a bit of googling for any candidate that passed the initial resume screening test.
Back in the early to mid 2000s this search often didn’t [...]

About half my career has been inside professional service firms. The work has quite a few perks and you’re constantly pushed to learn new things. Having spent quite a bit of time within IT departments as a manager I did sometimes missed the wealth of different clients and projects you’re exposed to as [...]

Unit testing is a practice that takes years to sink in. For many the first experience with the green/red bar is interesting, but not life altering. Maybe it was just a quick demo. They go back to the normal debugging patterns in the IDE or with printing output to the terminal. [...]

As a project manager on dozens of projects I have sent hundreds or perhaps thousands of project status reports. I’ve read even more status reports as a development manager often showing up Friday afternoons in the old inbox.
Every status report needs to cover the basics like budget, scope, and schedule. Other than that [...]

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 [...]