November 2009

You Should Brag More

November 26, 2009 Bragging

I work with a really great engineer named Simon. He takes complicated problems and designs simple solutions. His code is clean, easy to follow, and just plain works. And I almost didn’t realize it because he doesn’t brag enough. Bragging makes your work better for two reasons. You will make your code better so you [...]

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Make It Easy To Give You An “A”

November 24, 2009 Good Communication

As CEO of Code Sourcery, a small high-tech company, Mark Mitchell wants to make it easy for all of his customers to give his team an A. He manages over 30 employees working from home offices around the world and all of his engineers work closely with customers. They also take on project management responsibility. [...]

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Telework/life

November 19, 2009 Telecommuting Examples

The people I work with work everywhere. They’re dots all over the map. They work in offices, homes, and just about everywhere else. My day started this morning at 5:30 AM when the sun was rising, shining, and setting for various members of my team. Telecommuting is not a 9 to 5 job. Telecommuting lets [...]

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Don’t Make Your Team Work In The Dark

November 17, 2009 Management

Let’s pretend you’re a director at a large company. Two of your teams are delivering projects at around the same time. Your first team starts a mailing list and puts you on it. The list is pretty active and you can’t read all the mail, but from what you see the team spends a lot [...]

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The Wisdom of Mailing Lists

November 12, 2009 Good Communication

For decades mailing lists and IRC were the only tools available to open source projects. And they built cities on top of them. Apache HTTPd, Linux, and MySQL were all built on mailing lists. Emails flying back and forth between groups of people who had never met and were only connected by their interest in [...]

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