Programmer’s Paradox

Divide and Conquer.
It was while reading the Thrift white paper, and seeing this line in the conclusion that the connection hit me:
Thrift has enabled Facebook to build scalable backend services efficiently by enabling engineers to divide and conquer.
That’s exactly the point of all the various agile methodologies: enable a team to divide up the project [...]

Eric Sink has an interesting blog post about an experience he went through in his career where his manager showed incredible trust in him and everything turned out well.  It’s a story I wish more managers would read, but those who are likely to discover it have already learned the lesson and those who could [...]

Construx has released the results from their 2008 software mistakes survey.  It’s worth reading the article to see their methodology and how they slice and dice the numbers.
Here’s the final list they’ve come up with for the 10 classic software mistakes with the highest mistake exposure (meaning they have the highest average occurrence plus the [...]

I wish I had more to add to Steve McConnell’s post Measuring Productivity of Individual Programmers, but I don’t.
The short summary: don’t measure productivity of individual programmers.  Just don’t.  It’s a bad idea that returns you nothing.
He says a follow up post on measuring the productivity of teams is coming (which is something he does [...]