Even a cursory look online you will net lots of opinion and research telling you why software development is so much more predictable and efficient with proper software quality assurance (SQA), yet almost every small software shop decides SQA is one of the roles they can do without. Continue reading
“My Team Is Perfect,” Or Why You Need QA
Filed under Efficiency, Project Management, Software Development
Continuous Learning
When was the last time you did any work of significance, and didn’t have to learn something new along the way? I’m guessing it has been a while, if you can even remember such a time.
Jobs which don’t require you to learn, and then apply that learning, are not as engaging, nor as likely to stay local. Now we should expect ourselves to have to constantly learn and apply new concepts. It is for this reason good companies and hiring managers will not care nearly as much about what you can already do as they care what you can learn to do, and how quickly. Continue reading
Filed under Learning, Self-improvement
What do you love (enough to do it for a long time)?
Readers of the popular Dilbert comic strip will have no-doubt seen this recent comic.
This concept comes from the book, Outliers, where author Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly talks about how it requires 10,000 hours of practice to become truly good at something.
Some questions this raises:
Continue reading
Filed under Career, Learning, Planning, Self-improvement
What Is The Cloud?
There are some terms which are commonly misunderstood, one of the most common is the reference to “The Cloud.” This term initially came from network diagrams which depicted the internet as a big cloud. Over time, this has morphed into a description meaning any service consumed over the internet – which is by definition almost all network traffic. After all, your browser just made a request to my web server, and got back a response of this page – a simple standards compliant exchange over the internet. Unfortunately, Cloud Computing has taken on almost mythic proportions if you listen to our business leaders, and they usually don’t understand what they are talking about. If you are like me, you likely hear this term misused at least weekly, if not daily. Continue reading
Get your ego out of the way, and hire the best
How to you ensure you are hiring the best, and build teams which will help overcome any challenge?
Get yourself out of the way.
As described by Steve Jobs, A players hire A players, B players hire C players. If you are too afraid of being surpassed by or outshone by your team, you severely limit yourself. Even if you don’t think you are an A player, if you can get over the fact that you will be hiring people who may be able to take your job, you and your company will perform better. As a nice side effect, this single change alone may transform you into an A player.
Filed under staffing
Daily(ish) Reading
With all the information available to us, one of the challenges is deciding what we allow to enter our consciousness, and what gets ignored. Below are some of my regularly visited sources, and what I like about them.
- Slashdot – a great geeky news source, occasionally heavy on skepticism and ‘fight the man’ attitudes, but often points me towards things I otherwise wouldn’t have seen.
- Psychology Today – Understanding the way the human mind works is key to our success in almost every endeavor.
- Mashable – Collection of trends and topics which help keep me informed and keeps me from missing out on bits of culture which everyone seems to know but me. (Warning: if you aren’t careful, this can be a time-suck) Continue reading
Filed under Learning, News, Self-improvement
Preparing for success
How will your application do when you succeed?
When planning for capacity, everyone prepares for the average day, or perhaps a couple times that volume; but how about the day when your product or service goes viral and becomes insanely successful overnight? Most of us are not truly prepared for success, and can’t fathom the full potential upside of our actions. This phenomenon has been called the Digg, Slashdot or Reddit effect (among others), and has been the cause of many companies or sites missing out on most or all of their moment in the sun.
Don’t miss yours.How? Though each situation is unique, here are a few tips:
Filed under Planning