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Abstracting the Developer

Joel Spolsky posted about the concept of abstracting the developer to insulate them and make them more effective at the time.  I read this article and thought “This is great” and then “Damn my last PM did a great job of this”.  Today I realized another way that it can occur.

I’m currently working onsite with a client. We’ve all heard the horror stories of how contractors are given the closet (sometimes the water closet) for an office and a P2 with 128MB of RAM for them to run VS 2005 on. Today I realized the the client I’m currently working with has got it all right from a hardware standpoint. All people on my team, for the last year, have been working on P4 2Ghz boxes with 1GB of RAM. For a contractor this is paradise. I can go to work and I don’t have to dread compile time, or running out of memory, or waiting for my PC to boot.

Now, I know I’ve been lucky on site with a PC like that, but let’s talk about my 21” monitor. Mmmmmmm. Monitor. Today I found out that all the PCs are on a three year lease and our monitors are coming up for replacement right away. Yes I’m going to have to lose my beautiful and sexy 21” Sony Trinitron monitor, but I will be getting it replaced with a 19” LCD. Hopefully it will run at 1600x1200 for me.

I’m the Igloo Coder and size isn’t everything, unless you’re talking about monitors, RAM or processors…..