Post-Columbian Project Management By Dummies
Some time ago, I wrote about John, the fictive trekking leader, who came to fame and glory out of ignorance, and drew parallels to project management today. As it turns out, I didn’t have to invent a fictive story to illustrate the situation – there is an astounding historical example that backs it up 100%.
On this terrific Wikipedia page about common misconceptions, I found this: Read more >>
Sliding Notes Plugin Is Here
After some warm-up time with WordPress, I decided it’s about time to write a WordPress plug-in.
Not that I’ve been keen to program in another half-backed spawn of C++ (the mother of all programming language abominations ;-))1 with all the curly braces and clumsy syntax. But, the itching in my fingers was stronger then that.
So here it is! Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present: The Slider Shortcode! An easy way to add sliding notes» to your WordPress content!
Read the whole story on the plugin homepage.2
- As a former expert C/C++ programmer, I’m allowed to say that. Simply because… Well, simply because I know what I’m talking about. 🙂 [↩]
- Note that comments are closed on this post in favor of the plugin homepage. [↩]
This note is shown when the slider is clicked open.
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Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5Evolution And Project Management
In “The Costs Of Not Doing Something Else“, I made the aside conclusion that John’s trek only needed to meet some minimum criteria in order to be considered a success. That is an inherent property of what can be called an uncompetitive system.1
Coming back from treks to projects, I state:
Read more >>
- An uncompetitive system is a system lacking comparison to other systems of a kind. [↩]
The Costs Of Not Doing Something Else
I finished my last article on the project management topic with the thought:
It is common to measure the cost of what we do. But how do we measure the cost of what we don’t do, or don’t do differently?
In essence, it’s a question of how to measure the relative advantage or disadvantage of doing things one way or another.
To exemplify, I’d like to metaphorically use the notion of a trekking leader. (In many ways, a trekking leader is a good metaphor for a project manager, I believe.)
About Real And Fake Projects
During my career, I’ve occasionally encountered a certain type of project – a facade project.
I’m talking about the kind of “project” defined purely for administration purposes, and otherwise lacking the immanent properties of a real project, such as, and most importantly, a defined goal, and a limited time.
Evolution Of My Blog Categories
You may have noticed that there are no categories on my blog (except the default one, which I renamed from “uncategorized” to “assorted”). It is so by purpose.
The reasoning behind this is based on an agile development principle: Measure, Don’t Guess1, and is also in line with the general advice against including the category in permalinks2.
So, instead of “guessing” my categories, I decided to undertake a small experiment: I’ll wait until I’d have written enough articles, and see what categories naturally arise with my writing. My first checkpoint is at 10 posts, with an option to defer decisions for other 5-10 posts.
- also expressed in the OptimizeLast rule [↩]
- Look for the 5/29/08 update, it explains that you’d be in trouble if you wanted to change your categories later. There are more good arguments in comment #29 to this post on techcounter [↩]
The Truth About Simplicity
I’ve already used a smaller variant of this picture in my previous post, but it fits just so nicely into the whole simplicity topic, it simply must be shown in big again.
With no further words – here it is: 🙂
KISS My A*s
In my prior articles, I wrote about my views on simplicity, my objections to putting diffuse concepts into seemingly straight rules, and the risk of unintentionally sending the wrong messages therewith. Since then, I seem to keep stumbling upon stuff that somehow adds to my position.
KISS, in its purest an acronym for “Keep it simple, stupid” (note the comma!), is another example of a brilliant principle diluted in the process of mass circulation. Read more >>
Be Careful What You Optimize For
In two recent posts, I wrote about the notions of clever and dumb code, and the possible implications of their usage in their every-day language. There’s a particular point of interest related to these posts:
A common – and very understandable – motivation for requiring code to be “dumb” is the reasoning that if the code was dumb, then less skilled – and less paid – programmers could take on software development.
This is anther example how doing (or thinking) the “obvious” is a clear sign of shortsightedness.
Aside from evidence that mediocrity costs more, there is one more interesting long-term effect:
Read more >>
Psychology Of IT Language
In a recent post, inspired by an interview with Kirk Pepperdine, I’ve presented my view about the notions of “dumb” and “clever” code. Kirk’s reaction to it prompted me to think about the topic once more.
While I’m perfectly aware that in it’s origin, the notion of “dumb code” has been meant as synonym for “simple code”, and “clever code” as a synonym for “unnecessarily complex code”, I still see issues with the adopted terminology.
Read more >>
