During that, I don’t think or act on anything else. I turn off IM, phone, close the browser and stop letting others interrupt me. This way, I can finish it quickly and get on to the next unit of work.

If you find it difficult to stop others from interrupting you, using traditional techniques like telling them politely or not being so polite… you may try a different approach.

Apart from being more productive, I get many more chances to think if I want a break in between my tasks. This way, I burn less brain cells than I did when I thought I was multitasking.

Many claim they can multi task. I don’t believe we can multi task without loosing time or quality. I say, if you are a programmer, don’t do that. How can multitasking make you less productive? Studies suggest that changing between tasks makes you lose time. It could also make you stupider by not allowing you to learn during your work, the same way you could if you were focusing in one task.

Try it. It takes a while to get used to it, but you will never go back once you realize the benefits.

Having a slow machine is a punishment, not a means to write better software. If you need to build an application that performs well in a certain PC configuration, then you build exactly that configuration as a separate computer and do your testing, debugging, optimizing, profiling or whatever the hell one should do to a piece of software for testing, in that computer.

You, as a programmer, should have the fastest PC available. Why? Because, almost every freakin programming tool nowadays is dead slow and if you don’t have THE PC, you will soon get sick of waiting for the designers to draw themselves or for a project to finish loading. Your programmers will soon prefer the browser to hang around while their customer-optimized PC tries to build 10 projects.

The comment list of Jeff’s post is not the only place I have been introduced to such suggestions. It has also been suggested to me recently by a manager. This is getting worrying. For once and for all, repeat after me:

I will not punish my programmers by giving them a slow PC, in order to force them write faster applications. Instead, I will pretend I have a working brain for 5 minutes, which is enough for me to order a separate slower PC for testing and optimizing purposes.

If you think it is expensive, then you should close your company because obviously you are not able to calculate the ROI for actions you make.

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First let me tell you that I am greatly influenced by Joel Spolsky and his articles at Joel on Software. The now classic Joel Test article contains 12 steps that can serve as a checklist. Doing all or almost all of them will certainly improve your software development process. Except reading Joel, I learned a lot by reading many articles from various blogs written by software gurus.

In my upcoming first part post, I am going to describe to you how I setup version control, which version control system I chose and why it is essential to have a version control system setup. In the meantime reading The Joel Test will help you understand why should anyone get in the trouble of organizing the software development process.