Clips

Are you sabotaging your software developers’ motivation?

You get a wonderful idea for a software product. Or it may be anything high-tech. You want the world to benefit from it. You hire the best developers money can buy. In your impetuosity, you don't consider that now you have to deal with a black hole called human motivation. You know only one way to handle it. It's the stick-and-carrot pedagogy. Your teachers taught it to you when you were a child.

Are you safe from bad developers?

There are two main reasons for which developers may be bad. They may lack intrinsic motivation, the fire that lives inside good developers and that only them know how to stoke up when it grows weak. You can't set that fire. They may have worked in dysfunctional environments that snuffed out their motivation. They may have developed flawed habits presented to them as virtuous. You may still be able to repair the damage, provided there still is intrinsic motivation in them, that the fire is not completely extinguished.

Are you safe from deadlines?

The word deadline reminds me of uncivilised times when guards were shooting prisoners who were trespassing a line, sometimes even invisible, representing a limit beyond which there was freedom. Prisoners died for going beyond the deadline. Software projects die for managing to stay behind it. What kills projects that respect deadlines How can a project fail if it delivers within the deadline? Isn't it what they are supposed to do?

Are you still using CVs in your hiring process?

Imagine you are in the process of choosing your next smart-phone. You want to be environmentally conscious and change it as few times as possible, but you have to replace it at least when it gets too slow to run your favourite applications. They become more power-hungry by the day. You start your quest for information about different models and you stumble on a side-by-side comparison of the features two phones sport.

Bounce processing, when SMTP server doesn’t return bounces properly

What bounce processing is When you send an email, it’s possible that it’s returned to you because of technical problems or mistakes made when writing the email. One of these mistakes may be that the recipient’s email address is wrong. CRM sending mass emails Many CRMs, Customer Relationship Management system, have the capability of sending mass mailing. They can send the same newsletter to hundreds or thousands of recipients. CRM processing bounces If an email is returned because of any problem, the CRM will process it.

Depression in teens: what causes depression in teenagers

(this is part of an article I wrote for the website depressionteenshelp.com under the pseudonym Denny Dew) Depression in teens: Why is it on the increase? Several years ago, depression in teens was virtually unheard of. Now, however, it is within teens and young people that depression is increasing at the highest rate. There have been changes within society, and undiagnosed and untreated psychological problems are becoming more and more common.

How Agile Junk Will Mess up Your Software Project

These days if you are not Agile you must hide yourself, maybe in a church. When there, you may find people who have pity of you and grant you asylum despite the right having been abolished in 1623. Before Agile, software projects were failing at the same rate projects meant to build skyscrapers would fail if you insisted to do them only during an earthquake. Software projects are still jumping in droves off the seaside cliff of impossible deadlines like herds of lemmings.

How can you protect yourself from the accountability monster?

It's 1841, the 5th of October. A train is flying at full speed from Worcester, Massachusetts to Albany, New York. You are the conductor. You are happily singing because you are on schedule and everything is fine. Your happiness, however, is about to morph into terror. You see a light in front of you where you would never expect it to be. It's the headlight of a train that is about to crash frontally against yours.

How to test a software developerˊs skills

You are starting or run a high tech company and need to build software. You read that the majority of software projects fail. You are at ease with technology and maybe you wrote some code yourself, but the idea of doing it with others gives you the creeps. In this article I'll tell you about a part of the recruitment process, not all of it. I'll focus on technical tests you can use to vet candidates and I'll show you which ones to prefer and which ones to avoid.

How to Work Remotely

Why do I work remotely? I lived in London, UK for many years. My family live in France. At a given point I wanted to rejoin them. Modern technology allows me to work remotely and enjoy living with my family. I don’t have the stress of commute. I can work more and get less stressed because I don’t have the continuous interruptions I have in an office. You may want to work remotely for a lot of different reasons.