Posts by — Alex

I’m a big believer of the fact that developers need to be comfortable in order to produce at their highest potential. While this includes such things like a relaxed dress code, and an ergonomic and comfortable work space, a good work environment is what is most important.

Have Fun

Knowing that your day holds the potential to be fun makes it much easier to get up and come in to the office every day. Work is no longer a dull place to be, but a place you actually enjoy being in.

We do a lot to make sure that we can have fun at work. We have low-walled cubicles, so everyone can see everyone, which encourages communication and joking around throughout the day. For lunches and overtime breaks, when they happen, nearly everyone in the department has a Nintendo DS, and we’ll play multiplayer games for 20 minutes or half an hour.

It’s a great way to give your brain a bit of a break from your work and have fun with your co-workers.

Competitions

Hold competitions or contests that are open to anyone in the office to join. We typically run sports pool, especially during the playoffs. Charity fundraisers are big for us too. We recently held a “Toss and Rock” fundraiser. The main idea is to wear a t-shirt from your favorite band, play rock music for the day and compete in the paper airplane tossing competition.

The competition was simple, build your own airplane, and throw it into a box with a hole one foot across cut in it (we made it look like a ring that was on fire), that’s suspended 18 feet away, 10 feet off the ground. You got 2 throws for 5 bucks.

We ended up raising over $800 for a local charity that day, and everyone had a blast.

Put some thought into what would work to make your office a fun place to be. Try some of it out, it’ll help improve moral, and possible change some peoples’ attitude about work.

On his blog, Steve Rowe shares a story of an employee who claims to be done their work, but by Steve’s standards is not. Steve puts this down to a difference in opinion of the word ‘done’.
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Development is a very task oriented profession. Everything can be broken down into small requirements or tasks that need to be finished to get meet the overall goal. In some projects you might have hundreds of different steps to complete before you are done, and keeping track of these can be critical to success.
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A difficult, yet obvious, lesson to learn is that you need to know what you’re doing before you do it. Many developers just dive into a project without the proper planning or without fully understanding what it is that they need to get accomplished.

You might get a feeling of productivity because you’ve started coding, but what does it get you? What have you actually started to code? Chances are it’s not exactly what is required, and that means you’ve wasted your time. No matter how you cut it, wasting time is not productive.
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I’ve met, worked with or interviewed many “senior” developers, and it saddens me to say it, but most of them haven’t improved since the day they left school.

Time in the industry doesn’t make you any better at what you do, and it surely doesn’t make you worthy of the senior title.
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Management can be a tricky thing. Developing continuous improvement processes, input protocols, training procedures and a whole host of other things can be time consuming and difficult. And that’s when they actually work.

When it doesn’t though, you have to get at it again and try something else, taking up even more time and effort.
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This tip is something I learned watching my father growing up. He’s the Director of IT for the insurance division of one of the largest banks in North America, so I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing.

He was always a big advocate for spending time with his family, or at least being at home should anyone need him. To ensure that he could do this, he found a chunk of the day where he could be the most productive that wouldn’t take away from his time with anyone else.
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Problems are one of the few things we seem to never be in short supply of. Problem solvers, however, are more difficult to come by, and the reason for this is simple – most people don’t solve the real problem. They’ll come up with a short term patch and a clever spiel about how it’s the ultimate solution. Everyone then believes their hype and that’s that.

Two weeks, a month, or a year later the problem is back and twice as bad as it was before.
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After a year or two working at a company, you begin to have a good understanding of the flow of a project. You begin to understand what typically goes wrong and what doesn’t. As managers and developers, it is our jobs to optimize the flow and massage out any kinks in the process.
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Here are a couple of our articles from this week that we think you should check out if you haven’t already. There are more links to sites around the web after the jump.

And don’t forget that we’d like to hear from you. If you have a blog and you have a good article, let us know about it (we might link to it if we like it too…and this site is nofollow free!). If you’d like to write a guest post for us, we’re up for that as well.

• Fear the Documents
• How To Motivate the Unmotivated
• 5 Tips to Overcome Language Barriers

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