Experience

In the past I’ve had to take development teams and build their skills.  It was part of what I was hired to do.  “Build an app, and at the same time make our developers better.”  I’m back at it again and today I had a chat with someone online about where do you need to start. First you need to know what your goals are.  Usually I find that management is, by asking me to make their developers “better”, looking to increase quality, decrease development time and increase maintainability.  All of these are pretty vague and there’s certainly no...

Continuing on my journey through failures and the lessons that I’ve learned, we’re going to make a stop at a project that I did when I worked at a very small (but successful) development shop. I started at this shop and one of the first tasks that they assigned me was building a reporting engine for a POS style’d application that they were re-developing.  This sounded fine by me as I’d just rolled out of a company where I’d done the exact same thing.  I gathered what little info I had on the new and old applications plus the...

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes – Oscar Wilde Continuing on my series of posts themed around failure, we’re here to look at an interview that I once did.  It resulted in me taking the job.  That was the failure.  Before we get too far into this, let’s step back to the beginning….. When I was just getting started contracting/consulting independently, I was presented with the opportunity to be a team lead for a project.  I was told that the client was very excited to have me as a possible candidate...

In our Brownfield Application Development book, and in previous posts on this blog, Kyle and I have talked about the different personalities that you can encounter while working on a development project.  Unfortunately many of the types we listed, and that you see and remember, are negative.  Because development is such a social task (whether you like it or not) conflicts in personalities, styles and objectives are easily surfaced.  Add on a heavy dose of introversion and natural social ineptness and you have a cauldron of simmering conflict just waiting to bubble over. During the hiring process HR and...