I was chatting today with a European freelance developer who is thinking about setting up a software agency. He asked me if I had any advice for him after building Salsita from a guy in his bedroom to a 40 person company with 25 full-time developers in a little over…
23 posts tagged
Code & Tools
Why We Don't Do Fixed-Price Software Projects (And Neither Should You)
A few years ago, I took on a freelance project to implement an Internet Explorer component in C++. I was billing a healthy hourly rate on other projects at the time, but this particular client insisted on a fixed price. In a bout of temporary insanity, I made an exception…
What I Wish I Knew When Starting Out as a Software Developer: Slow the Fuck Down
The other day I read What I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career as a Software Developer, an article in Lifehacker adapted from a Quora answer by Michael O. Church. I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I guess I find it so thought-provoking because, while I agree…
The Shifting Definition of Front-End Developer
Until the advent of the web, professional software development didn't have a front-end/back-end dichotomy. There were C programmers, Pascal programmers and FORTRAN programmers, but the language they used was a detail rather than a reflection on their background and career path. Then the web came along, triggering the influx…
Practical Lessons in Peer Code Review
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 from our…
Outgrowing Pivotal Tracker
At Salsita, we've been using Pivotal Tracker as our primary project management tool for over two years now. When choosing a tool, we were looking for something generic enough to use both to present a project overview to clients and to manage developers' day-to-day work. We've tried various solutions, but…