I went to dinner with a friend of mine a couple of months ago. He was visiting Prague from Israel and carrying two phones with him so he could use both Czech and Israeli SIM cards. The reason? He "couldn't afford to pay the international data roaming charges." My friend…
Paul Graham's latest essay makes an impassioned plea for more liberal immigration policies in the United States for high-tech workers. Software startups are desperate for great developers, he writes, and the notion that we can meet this need simply by training more Americans is idiocy. The only way to satisfy…
We had a heated debate today in our weekly all-hands developer meeting about whether agile points should be given to bugs and chores as well as features. We use the story types mandated by Pivotal Tracker. In a nutshell, features are stories that add clear value to the user (so…
If you have ever developed a complex iOS app, there's a good chance that you have bumped into iTunes app name expiry. If so, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs. Often a new iOS development project starts out not just with a great idea, but also with a…
Millions of years ago, apes descended from the trees, evolved opposable thumbs and—eventually—became human beings. We see mandatory code reviews in a similar light: something that separates human from beast on the rolling grasslands of the software development savanna. Nonetheless, I sometimes hear comments like these…
