I’ve been looking into better ways to host my repositories for clients, manage task lists, documents, etc. I like github. It’s a good interface. It works. I could use a few more features in the Issues module, but it’s nice that they keep it simple. I’ve tried BitBucket and Assembla, and looked at several others. I’ve managed my own servers. In every test, github wins.
Except for price. github is often the most expensive. Especially if you need what I need, which is several small repositories, each with a small number of collaborators (often just one or two). But just a few of those can push you into the Medium plan, or even into the Bronze plan. Read more…
Thanks to @codinghorror, I recently read a blog post from Steve McConnell called 10x Productivity Myths: Where’s the 10x Difference in Compensation? Steve quotes a question from Pete McBreen:
“One point in his article that McConnell did not address–programmer compensation does not vary accordingly. This is a telling point–if the difference is productivity can be 10X, why is it that salaries rarely fall outside the 2X range for experienced developers?” [emphasis in original]
He then provides some fairly satisfying answers. “The other guy is actually overpaid.” “You’re confusing coding with actual business value.” “Companies pay the least they can get away with.” etc. All his answers make good, intuitive sense. Unfortunately, despite being a longtime fan of Steve McConnell’s work, I believe most are irrelevant or incorrect.
Read more…
Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software is one of my favorite writers in the software industry. He’s insightful, pithy, and practical. But sometimes he and I part ways, at least in practice, and “Evidence Based Scheduling” is one of those times.
The trouble with the “break it into tiny pieces” approach is that the number of pieces quickly explodes so large that the act of tracking them swamps the project. And now, rather than getting wildly behind schedule because you underestimated how long a particular piece will take, you’re behind schedule because you underestimated how many pieces there were. And now you have more project management overhead…. Read more…
