Martin Fowler has a nice piece on what a good team room should look like.
Here is what ours looks like:
Many times when we have visitors I get asked if sitting together so closely is not problematic. Especially if the person asking comes from a background of two people private offices.
My answer is always the same. I used to have a nice Jugendstil turn of the century private office with wooden floor and plastered ceiling – I don’t want to trade back: >> more…
We recently closed our offshore development office in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We had a great team there but weren’t able to integrate them well enough into the processes here in Munich. As we had no plans to grow the office in SPB significantly and we only had four guys there, we were stuck in the middle. The team was too small to be self sustainable, especially with regard to offering everybody a clear track for personal development.
So after almost a year of agonizing and sometimes just deferring the issue, at the start of this year we together with the team decided to close the office. Everybody had almost nine months of warning to look for a new job. Plus we created an attractive termination package to make sure that all the young families that had sprung up around our team there were provided for. >> more…
I have always had the feeling that industrial processes are a bad metaphor for software development.
If creating software were like producing cars, then more people would mean more output. Somehow I have never seen that work. Ever since Fred Brooks it’s been accepted fact that there is a diminishing returns curve we are on in adding people to a project. I was surprised when I found this blog post that showed that research indicated that the optimum productivity is actually at very small team sizes (actually 4.6)
Neither does 37signals: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume.html
The code candidates send us is much more interesting than the typical alphabet soup project listings you normally find in developer resumes (“worked on XML/SOAP/J2EE/AOP project using Oracle, IntelliJ, Java 1.6 and Rational Rose”)
Typically we can tell just from the code if we want to hire somebody. The interview is typically to check for cultural fit. And most people we hire spend a day here working with us. In the last two years we only had one false positive, whom we had to let go during the initial months.
The last couple of weeks I have been mystified. My iPad doesn’t have GPS but it always knows where I am down to a couple of meters. I know that Apple has been using WiFi based geo-location already in the iPhone but I just couldn’t explain how my private hotspot and my friend’s down the street or even the one at my office could have ended up in Apple’s database.
The only explanation I could come up with was that Apple had used my iPhone’s GPS to gather geo coordinates for all WiFi hotspots I came close to. That sounded too scary and conspiratory-theory like to really contemplate.
And then I read this: >> more…
I admit it. I had to get it and I did.
Now I have this shiny (more on that later), magical and revolutionary device sitting on my desk.
And here is the answer to the most asked question of the last week “how do you like it?”
I like it a lot, but I am still searching for a proper place for it in my life.I have my laptops (yes, two: one MacBook Air for iPhone coding and one Lenovo X60 for real work – I couldn’t function without Office 2007), one of them typically is within easy reach. On the road I have my iPhone which does pretty much all I want to do on the road. >> more…
Over and over in study after study two important factors emerge for both sucessfull learning in school and productive work in the office:
a) You need to be in a setting where you feel appreciated and actually like and are liked by the people you work with
b) You need to be self-determined with respect to what you work on.
Here is another nice blog post that illustrates how important these two factors are.
http://home.foerster-kreuz.com/2010/03/statement-warum-sie-am-wochenende.html
I would love to receive on of these, some time.
Didn’t know these still existed:
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// This variable enables domain checking, if it is set to true domain checking will be enabled, conversely if it is false
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// domain checking will be disabled.
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// Example : var elqIC = true;
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// Default : var elqIC = false;
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var elqIC = false;
Taken from JavaScript code provided by the leading online marketing automation provider.