The Mindset

Here’s a little party trick for true geeks. Take your company’s coding standards. Count the number of times an ‘_’ character appears in it. Multiply this number by the maximum number of lines allowed per function. Add the number of times the word “comment” is mentioned in the document. Divide the result by the number […]

Well, it has been three days since my Hiring Great Developers? post. During this time an interesting discussion took place both on this blog as well as on others. I usually try to respond to most of the comments posted here, but this time I’ve decided to step back and let the discussion roll. Now […]

Stop whatever it is you’re doing. There’s a new buzz in town.
In our ultra-dynamic industry, yesterday’s Holy Grail is today’s old news. A couple of days ago I wrote about Googlism as the new emerging religion, and what do you know, I’ve just discovered the signs of a new one, already creeping into blogs, articles, […]

Here’s a pop-quiz: what do [take a long breath] Agile, Peer Reviews, JUnit, Pair Programming, SCRUM, velocity charts, burn-down charts, Bugzilla, Subversion, lint, ClearCase®, RequisitePro®, ClearQuest®, RUP, UML, MDA, TDD, BDD, XP, ISO, CMM, and (my personal all-time favorite) Refactoring have in common?
OK now, let’s see. If you found it easy to come up with […]

A couple of weeks ago I heard a developmental psychologist say that children learn by emotional experience. When you’re trying to explain to a child that something is forbidden, for example, he may understand your words, but unless you can somehow reach him at an emotional level, chances are he will repeat the same behavior […]

We are always in a hurry! That’s what modern life is all about. Always trying to move faster, to make it first, or better still to make it now.
Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that life (and business) shouldn’t be a race. It should be a journey. And like any other journey, we […]

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. […]

In a recent post, my friend Tom Harris writes about the process of learning at work. As you might know, this is one of my favorite topics.
Tom describes something similar to a decision tree to help you come up with a plan regarding how you want to treat the process of learning and the process […]

Have a look at this post by chrishmorris about improving your professional skills by systematically learning from your own experience (and the experience of others).

“To improve, they must not only learn more theory, they must also think about what they have done.”
The idea of keeping a reflective journal is a great idea. Mastering context sensitive […]

My Are Your Code Reviews Effective? post raised some fine questions. The most popular question regarding Professional Reviews argued that reviews conducted by a professional mentor will not provide the benefit of knowledge sharing that other reviewing methods seem to provide.
Knowledge sharing among team members is an important goal. Having only a single developer who knows […]