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September 24, 2003
Managing Software Engineers
http://ccm.redhat.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/
via Joel on Software
Some favorite quotes
People worked insanely hard to make their projects successful and their clients happy
Good people like to work with other good people. This is true in every field but much more acute in software engineering. Why? Consider two management consultants working on different projects but within the same organization. If Consultant A does a bad job it harms Consultant B's reputation to some extent but does not require Consultant B to take any action. Whereas in most tech companies if Programmer A does a bad job it usually means that Programmer B will eventually be forced to use the bad code, read the bad code, and then fix the bad code.
Great programmers get a lot of positive reinforcement from their work itself. They write some code and immediately can see it dance.
These precisely organized large organizations where each person had his role, however small, were supposed to overtake the American approach where small teams of craftsmen worked in a comparatively disorganized manner. The factory approach sometimes produces acceptable corporate IT solutions but for innovation and successful product development, the craft approach has been overwhelmingly vindicated.
Posted by mikel at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2003
Dave Barry loves Idaho
Just catching up on my Dave Barry reading and noticed he has mentioned the Sun Valley, ID area in his last two columns.
Having Grandpa visit Indiana made me realize Jessica and I need to get back to Idaho for a visit. See Grandpa and Russ in Hailey, visit the the cousins in Boise, and stop in on the old co-workers in Ketchum.
Posted by mikel at 07:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2003
long lost cousins?
Jim Bottum and Bill O'Reilly
Posted by mikel at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2003
Grandpa Don's 80th Birthday Party
The Nappanee version of Grandpa Don's 80th birthday party was a big success.
Posted by mikel at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
northwoodathletics.com
Found out this weekend that the Nappanee and Waky Chambers of Commerce are broadcasting the NWHS football games online. Mark Mikel confirms they will do 21 basketball games this year!
Posted by mikel at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2003
Sharpreader
Sharpreader is my current rss aggregator of choice. Written in C# for .NET of course :)
Posted by mikel at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
Keeping up with Joneses (er, Myerses)
Ok, so now I need to get a camera phone. Brad set up a moblog, mostly for pictures of his kid :) I think getting a kid justifies lots of cool purchases. I know several guys that have gotten digitial camcorders and gotten passed the accountant (i.e. wife) once they had a kid. Not sure if I'm willing to go that far to get cool electronics though. Jessica did say last night we need a web cam so we can keep an eye on Kerby
Posted by mikel at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2003
Audible Books
Download books on tape. This could be pretty cool. Make those long drives seem a lot shorter.
http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/welcome.jsp
Posted by mikel at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2003
Kerby
I have a cute not-so-little pup named Kerby. Kerby is short for Kerberos a.k.a The Hound of Hades. It's fitting since he's part hound (black and tan coonhound, we think) and German Shepherd. You computer people will also recognize that it's the same name as the network authentication protocol from MIT.
Now that I've talked about my pet, I think this is an official blog.
Posted by mikel at 08:15 AM | Comments (0)