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…
31 posts tagged
Software Engineering
Here's How Your Mom Would Want You to Develop Software
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…
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…