The Mindset

When I was at school, there were many things I hated learning. History was one of them. It’s not that I found it boring. There were times that I’ve actually enjoyed reading this stuff. But memorizing dry facts and numbers just to be able to mechanically spill them out in some exam wasn’t my thing. […]

Dear CEO,
This post is for you (but the rest of you readers are welcome to read on as well).
Today, I have a special offer for you. An offer that will make your life so much easier that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
Your competitors might already have one, but they probably […]

After writing about the importance of books and having a library, I think it’s time for my modest contribution. So I’ve decided to add a page dedicated to recommended books.
The Bookshelf doesn’t include any reviews. It is… well… a bookshelf — a list of books I think any software practitioner should read.
I will be trying not to clutter […]

Whenever I talk with managers about office politics I get this apologizing, yet sometimes accusing, look saying: “What can we do? If you’re not a politician around here you do not exist”. And this is probably the case. Managers have to be politicians to do their job well. Is that bad?
Politicians are generally not highly […]

A few years ago, I tried to introduce a systematic code and design review process to the organization I worked for. For months, I repeatedly received the same answer: “We know this is a good idea, but our developers won’t like the idea of their code being read by their colleagues. And anyway, we really […]

For decades software development practitioners try to find the ultimate software development metaphor. This is not merely an academic discussion. If we can find a good metaphor for software development we might actually learn something from it. We can make analogies and try to apply things we already know about our world to software development […]

In my previous post I questioned the popularity of peer reviews in the real-world. I claimed that there might be a good reason that most organizations are not practicing systematic peer reviews: the nature of peer reviews causes too much overhead and context switching, which makes them ineffective for the long run.
But what about […]

When I first wrote about professional reviews as a mentoring platform, some people responded with the question: what’s wrong with peer reviews anyway? Why do we need a person specializing in code and design reviews instead of assigning this task to peer developers within the development team?
As I explained in previous posts (and as you […]

A couple of days ago I came across this article about Google’s new headquarters. Judging from its del.icio.us popularity chances are you did as well.
Obviously, it is amazing (at least for an outsider browsing the picture). I’m sure that in reality it makes an even stronger impression. The vivid colors, the open spaces combined with […]

Whenever I meet someone who is performing systematic code reviews, I am thrilled. Code reviews are close to my heart, and, believe me, meeting such a person is not a common event as one might think. So whenever I do meet such a person, I just want to know everything about how he handles his […]