October 2009 Entries

Like my past posts in this series, we’re going to talk about failures and I’ve had this problem at a number of places that I’ve been employed or contracted.  I just can’t maintain flow.  Developers all know what flow is, whether this is what you call it or not.  You know that feeling when you’re “in the zone” or “on fire”.  That’s flow.  It’s a period of focused hyper-productivity.  We enjoy it.  I long to experience the adrenaline like rush that it provides to me.  The things is, achieving flow is the exception, not the rule, for our daily lives. ...

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...

I recently posted about Hiring Internally and it turned out to be about the failure in leadership that I had on a project.  I’m fine with that.  For those of you that don’t know, I fail.  I do so spectacularly (sometimes) and regularly.  Welcome to my realm.  What I do, however, that may (or may not) separate me, is spend considerable time thinking about the reasons for, actions taken during and result of those failures. In the spirit of Scott C. Reynolds’ recently started series baring all for critcism, I’m going to do the same.  I’m going to openly...

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...