“Rands, I’ve got the idea. I’m serious. It’s going to be big and I’ve got my three MBA buddies lining up seed financing. Seriously big idea here, Rands. And I need a favor.” Uh oh. “I need a Free Electron.” There is a list of the six confirmed Free Electrons that I know. Every six… more
“What, exactly, do you do?” Slack. Jawed. Amazement. This question is coming from someone I trust. A trusted employee who has been working in my group at the start-up for years. This guy always tells me the straight dope and now he’s asking me what I do with my day because he honestly does not… more
There’s a Screwed Scenario that I missed. Back in my Borland days, we were working hard on Paradox for Windows. I was a QA engineer testing the database creation and modification functionality. My counterpart in engineering, Jerry, was working hard, but getting absolutely nowhere. We were mid-to-late in a 1.0 product cycle and most of… more
You can smell when crunch time is coming. Engineering is saying the features are done. QA is pulling their hair out trying to get these working features actually working. Meanwhile, there is a steady flow of bugs trickling in and no one is looking at them. These are the side-effect bugs introduced by landing these… more
Cabel Sasser of Panic dropped a shirt off with me shortly before my first presentation at WWDC. For those of you still using Lynx, the shirt reads, “Hi, I make macintosh software.” While Jimmy Eats World was ripping the tunes at the WWDC campus bash, I proudly wore the aforementioned shirt all over the campus.… more
I’m scratching my head regarding my recent upgrade to Movable Type 3.0. Back in April, it became fashionable to rip on Six Apart and their apparent desire to make money as a company. Rabid discussions ensued regarding their pricing and, to their credit, the general agreement is that they’ve nailed their revised pricing, but still… more
As a manager in any software engineering organization, you’re going to be subject to a lot of interpersonal angst amongst the team members. You’ll be walking to lunch and Engineer A is going to be ranting and raving about Engineer B on another team… “Man that guy bugs me. Have you seen his code? Wow!… more
You and your software development team are close. So close. Just a few more bugs and you’re ready to get those bits out there. You can taste it, but… the bugs keep showing up. Five in the morning. Ten in the afternoon. Oh shit, fifteen more during the weekend. Each day… anything more than zero… more
I’m in the midst of chewing on an article regarding things you absolutely, positively must have in order to design, develop, and ship product and what to do when those things just don’t exist. The article and my current work situation has reminded me the importance of bug tracking. In each company I’ve worked, the… more
At some point during the software development process, the engineering team will suddenly decided there is no way the product is: Going to be done on schedule and/or Going to be an acceptable quality. The realization is going to paralyze the team with fear, work will stop, and hands will be thrown in the air.… more
