Profitable Free Time If you’ve ever been invited to interview at Google or you simply keep up with the way it does things, you’re probably familiar with Google’s “20 percent time”. According to HowStuffWorks (of all places): Another famous benefit of working at Google is the 20 percent time program. Google allows its employees to…
There are a lot of ways in which you can do two or more things at once and succeed only in doing them very poorly, so I’m always in search of a way to do multiple things at once but to actually get value out of both things. As a programmer with an ever-longer commute,…
Micro-Scrum A week or two ago, I read Stephen Walther’s blog post “Scrum in 5 Minutes” and reading his description of the backlog reminded me of a practice that I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of lately. My practice, inspired by Kent Beck in his book Test Driven Development By Example, is to…
Many moons ago in my first role as a developer, I had very little real work to do for the first month or so on the job, so I occupied myself with poking around the company intranet, jotting down acronyms, figuring out who was responsible for what, and documenting all of this in spreadsheets and…
A Simpler Time When I was in college in the late 90’s, we didn’t use source control. The concept existed but wasn’t pervasive in my environment. (Or, if it was, I have no recollection of using it). And, why use it? We were working projects lasting less than a semester (usually far less) and in…
