Management

There are few indications of how broken an office communications culture is than emails titled “PLEASE STOP AND READ THIS MESSAGE.” There was a time when Email was to office communications as Democracy was to government — “the worst… except for all the others.”

That’s not true anymore. There are better ways to communicate, collaborate, and work together. Choosing good ones and encouraging the adoption of them can really change the character and nature of your work-place. Give it a try.

I’ve been doing front-line software development for more than a decade now.  I got my first job in the industry working for this small startup making the digital equivalent of a calendar or a fruit-basket for real estate agents to give out to their clients.  The business side of the enterprise seemed so far away then; the rest of the team and I put our heads down, banged out features, solved problems, and were shocked to find, three years later, that the product we’d so  lovingly crafted wasn’t selling because our target market didn’t have money to buy it.

Since then I’ve worked for the military and done battle with ColdFusion, a contract development shop where I tooled around with mobile before mobile was big, and another small company doing C# web development for the mortgage industry.  As I’ve changed jobs my roles and responsibilities have drifted further and further away from head-down coding and towards more nebulous things like “architecture,” “process,” and “professional development.” (more…)

Software development is about process refinement.  Try something, see if it works, revise, adapt, reset, and try again.  If you’re doing the same thing the same way every time you’re not moving forward and, in this field, that means you’re falling behind.  Do that long enough and you start to apply it to other things in your life.  I switched from a QWERTY layout to Dvorak for more or less that reason (working out well, by the way) and I’ve taken up baking and gotten into coffee with much the same approach.   (more…)

There’s a wonderful post over on the JitBit founder’s blog which is apparently a 2nd generation attempt to answer this question.  Follow this link if you want to read the whole thing but I’ve quoted a bit below to give you the feel of it.

Job requirements: professional skills in driving normal- and heavy-freight cars, buses and trucks, trolley buses, trams, subways, tractors, shovel diggers, contemporary light and heavy tanks currently in use by NATO countries.

Skills in rally and extreme driving are obligatory!
Formula-1 driving experience is a plus. (more…)