Posts by — Alex

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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Through my career, it’s easy to say that I’ve worked on hundreds of different projects for many different clients. Some for small companies with small budgets, small teams to get the work done and short timelines. Other projects are for large companies, with large teams and long timelines. The one connection between all of these projects is this: the documents can make them or break them.

Fear the docs. Fear what they can do to your project and your sanity.
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With the combination of growing multiculturalism and increased overseas outsourcing, there is a greater demand on communication skills than ever before. Not only do you need to be able to explain yourself and understand others, but you need to do this regardless of their native tongue. Here are a few tips that I’ve found to be helpful in my dealings with people who speak another language, or have a very heavy accent that I find hard to understand.
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