The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?:

The problem here is that the [Software Management Formulas] incorporate a number of flawed assumptions. The first of these assumptions is that programmers are fungible. The SMFs assume all programmers will contribute roughly the same amount to a project and […]

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Adam Turoff wrote a very insightful post last month about rewriting software that seems very relevant given the recent furor over rewrites. Essentially, Adam is saying that it may in fact be OK to rewrite a piece of software and he mentions Firefox as an example of a rewrite that was successful.1

He follows up this […]

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Raise of hands: who wants to start the next 37 Signals, Fog Creek, or even Google? Both of my hands are up and I doubt I’m the only one. Just think of all the creative and interesting software that is being created in garages, basements, and commuter buses out there. While I don’t want to […]

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Last September I was browsing in a book store and looked at a copy of Entrepreneur magazine. The cover story that month was titled “Next-Gen Innovators” and the blurb on the cover read:

Forward-thinking entrepreneurs are making strides in promising areas—from nanotech to biotech to semiconductors. Will any of them build the […]

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I recently came across this little gem over at Signal vs. Noise:

A dissatisfied Basecamper wrote to us that “Real project management requires the determination of the critical path.” I thought that sounded zen…but I had no idea what it meant. Ryan said it reminded him of a bit from Tufte’s […]

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Everyone knows a programmer who is more concerned about microseconds of execution time than whether or not the correct result is returned. The opposite of those programmers are the architects who follow the mantra “Make it correct then make it fast”. These architects seem equally unconcerned about getting the result in a reasonable time as […]

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Steve Yegge writes about the problems with technical interviews. He certainly paints a bleak picture of the current state of the art. I think the real problem is that technical interviewing is really the type of unconscious decision making that Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink. When a really good hacker walks into the room […]

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A common complaint about Java desktop applications is that they do not have a look and feel that is consistent with the operating system. Is this really a problem? Does anyone really care about UI consistency? Microsoft doesn’t, at least not in the same way as the complainers, and in this case I agree with […]

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The UML is a very effective notation for object oriented software designs. However, as with many useful tools, there seems to be some misunderstanding about what the UML can and cannot do. This misunderstanding can lead to organizations failing to meet their goals because they are not using their tools properly. This is unfortunate since […]

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Trying to design an interface is nothing short of agonizing at times when we are dealing with users and their needs (or more to the point, requests). Most of us can relate to how hard it can be to get coherent requirements for an application.

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