7deeds

I have just read a job post in some job site and among other requirements, they are asking for a “multitasking” person.

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Jason Fried @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Some points of interest from the video:

• Charge for your products
• Don’t use plans
• Don’t work all together in open spaces where every one can interrupt each other
• Share your knowledge and watch for things that can be extracted into products
• Ideas are for ever, but inspiration for implementing them can expire

Recently, I discovered something about myself. One way to actually do something worth throughout the course of a day, is break down my tasks into very small units of work. Then, start working on one unit of work at a time.

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Once upon a time, there was this newly hired software development team leader, named Joe, who wanted to organize the software development department of a company. He told the bosses they should really choose and buy a project management/issue tracking tool. The bosses were OK with that and let Joe buy that tool.

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We all know the typical programmer: A geek that lives to sit in front of a computer 24/7, feeding on pizzas and refreshments, getting little sleep and never exercising.

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As a professional programmer for over a decade, the applications I am proud for having developed can be counted on one hand. I always wondered why. As I was thinking about it, a pattern was revealed. All these applications were developed by me in order to solve a problem that I had.

What this really means, is that I was the first user for these applications. I knew exactly what the problem was, and I also knew what the best solution should be.

Developing other applications where I am not really a user, means I only have my accumulated knowledge over the years about the business domain, the knowledge of other people, my assumptions and my ability to continue writing code even if I am bored to death. I can tell you this is really difficult to handle. Developing in order to solve something you really don’t care about. Developing an application based on assumptions you make is a time bomb ready to explode.

Most successful and usually small companies, started out solving their own problem first and then offered their solution to the public. There are always people out there that want a solution to the same problem as yours.

I think this is a recipe for success even if you don’t have a lot of money to begin with.

After reading Jeff Atwood’s post The Programmer’s Bill of Rights, where Jeff suggests programmers should have a fast PC, I checked out the comments. Of course I found a lot of people agreeing but some disagreed with that specific item. They suggested that a programmer should have a slow PC in order not to write bloatware. Excuse me?!

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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