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Great software development is a creative discipline that requires skillful individuals, effective organization and undying passion from all who are involved. There are many theories about developer productivity, engineering management and company organization, but few that make an honest attempt to reconcile all of these factors and present an approach that both builds from proven [...]

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants them to do, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
Theodore Roosevelt
An effective leader is not an autocrat. The best leaders who build the most support and achieve the most lasting success [...]

Your screeching smoke detector wakes you up and you smell smoke. Adrenaline is pumped throughout your system and you’re on your feet at the doorway, staring at a hazy room with flames in the background. What are you doing to make this situation better?
You’re at a family gathering during the holidays. Everyone is having a [...]

Somehow it still isn’t understood that programmers don’t produce their best work during any specific set of hours or only when they are in the office. Programming is an activity cognitively closer to philosophizing than it is to elementary math or physics. The best work doesn’t get done between 9am and lunch, with Sue from [...]

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

-John W. Gardner

Quality is important in plumbing, philosophy, and coding all the same…

When starting a tech business it’s traditional to think that you must have representatives from each of the various roles present at the beginning: the business person, the tech person, the marketing person, etc. There is a strong cult of opinion on what it takes to create a successful business and most of that opinion [...]

Recently I used Fog Creek’s Copilot software to attempt to help a family member import some favorites into Firefox. I followed the original Project Aardvark team two summers ago and knew what Copilot was in broad strokes.
So I ran the two minute trial and things seemed to work as expected. I bought a day pass [...]

Engineers like problems and businesspeople like solutions. When was the last time you heard any executive say, “let’s sit down in front of this whiteboard and try to better understand the problem at hand”? If it was recent, congratulations, you’re in a lucky minority. The truth is that the majority of executives want to hear solutions, not problems; sales, not internal struggle.

I am frequently confronted by a dilemma while working on new projects — that is, writing new code and designing new architectures. The whole time I’m designing the architecture I think of how much better it could be solved for a more general case. There is a constant temptation to step back and [...]