I’ve been rather busy these past few weeks as I come up to speed on my new job. During this period I’ve had several thoughts that keep coming back into my head. The first is that process has to make the product and the path to product get better. A lot of people share this [...]
For the better part of my career I’ve been either a lead developer, architect or manager. For an even bigger chunk of that time, I’ve worn those hats at the same time. This is the nature of small company life. However, there are a few things I’ve learned along the way; things that separate good [...]
To be a great manager, you need to gain both loyalty and respect from the people who work for and with you. Respect can be achieved by simply doing your job well and I’ll cover that in some later post. Loyalty, however, is another thing entirely and it must be earned.In fact, if you try [...]
A few days back I was having a discussion with another start-up junkie about what we look for in a company. There are the obvious things like cool technology and disruptive ideas. However, at the end of the day, what may be more important than those two areas, is the culture. For me, this means [...]
There are moments when you realize that you have more freedom as a developer than as a manager. Those moments, to me, are rare. They typically occur in one of two ways. The first (and the one I’m going to write about) deals with market/investor driven requirements versus engineering requirements/constraints. The second, people, I’ve touched [...]
I got an email today from a friend of mine that basically bemoaned the state of the world with regards to how quickly we become obsolete. Life is moving really fast; especially for those of us who make a living in the world of hi tech and he’s feeling like the technology rat race is [...]
This is more a general view of a few ideas that I tend to hold and act upon. The difference between a junior engineer and a senior is that a senior will ask questions whereas a junior is afraid to Everyone should get their say, but when you leave the room with a decision in [...]
There has been several times in my career where I’ve been a part of a brainstorming session that spanned several days (or weeks). In almost every case, as the time wore on, the coffee ran out, and frustration set in I saw many techniques for defusing potentially rough situations. The interesting thing, all these techniques [...]
One of the hardest things to change in an organization is requirements gathering. Sadly, this is also one of the critical pieces that can determine if your project will finish on time or drag on forever – or at least drag on for what feels like forever. Being in the start-up world for most of [...]
Over the past few weeks I’ve touched base with many former co workers and invariable the conversations come back to our time working together. This got me to thinking about various roles one can play in an organization, especially the role you play towards development. I’ll call the two development extremes Pollyanna and Kassandra. The [...]
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