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…
14 posts tagged
Project Management
Apple's New App Name Reservation Policy Makes Life Easier For Developers (and App Name Squatters)
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…
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…
"Because We Can" is Not a Good Reason
The two business books that have most influenced me are Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive. Grove’s book explains that, for long-term success, established businesses must periodically navigate “strategic inflection points”, moments when a paradigm shift forces them to adopt a…
Agile Pointing: Fibonacci or Fibo-yes-chi?
My natural inclination is to be skeptical of anything billed as a "software development methodology". I still remember my early years as a professional developer in France in the early 90's when the "Merise" methodology was ubiquitous. To me it seemed like an excuse to spend…