I’ve told you once, and I will tell you 1,000 times more in my career: if you are not 100% unavailable for at least 2 hours a day, you probably aren’t getting much done that’s of any importance. Although I not-so-famously disagreed with Jason Fried on the issue of functional…
Christopher Hawkins
Since I’m constantly writing about what developers do wrong, it seems only fair to address problem clients as well. I recently had to terminate my business relationship with a couple of clients, and a couple more may be on the way. I know I’m not the only one, so perhaps…
Revised on 13 May, 2015 I found a good post about functional specs when I was reading Ian landsman’s blog this morning. Ian notes the different opinions on whether or not writing functional spec is a good idea – one camp claiming that spec is purely a political appeasement move,…
Having a great conversation with Val the C# Gal, thought I’d share. So, Christopher . . . Not to back you into a corner, but if you had your druthers, how small would you like projects broken up? A month of requirements gathering, followed by a month of spec writing,…
In my self-appointed role as an effectiveness fanatic, I often ponder the process of setting goals for a project, or for my personal life. Setting goals is tough. “Wait a minute” you think. “What’s tough about goal setting? You state a desired outcome, and BAM! You have your goal. Right?”…
2004 has come and (nearly) gone. I can’t say I’ll miss it much. Not that 2004 was a bad year – but it was a trying year. Growing a business is hard, solitary work sometimes. I’m starting to see my company’s growth curve start to take off, and I am…
Not too long ago, a hard drive failed in my primary dev machine. It turned out that although I had been backing up most of my important files, I had not been backing them all up. Net result? The fruits of about $50,000 worth of my labor was gone. That…
I just read an interesting message posted by Pi Guy on Joel Spolsky’s site. This fellow works as a developer but does not like any of the non-coding aspects of his job: I’m a “programmer” at a small web development company. We do web design, asp/asp.net/sql server applications. I generally…
Working with small businesses, I often find that the person designated to be my point of contact on a given project is made responsible internally for the success or failure of the project, but has no technical knowledge whatsoever. I am accustomed to mitigating this kind of situation by translating…
This morning, I found a great post by Val the C# Gal on the practice of “gold plating” your projects. For those unfamiliar with the term, gold-plating refers to overbuilding a project in order to make more money from it. Val’s post raises a good questions: how much planning is…