This blog post titled “Agile is a Sham” offends me a little bit. The post screams hey, I am a cowboy programmer, and it almost implies that if you employ processes then you are stupid.
In this day and age, I would have thought finding the right tool for the right job is common sense. Apparently not.
Agile, among many other things, is not a silver bullet - it never was and it never will be. The key thing is to experiment and find what works for you, your team and your company. Most software projects are done in a team environment - putting a bunch of talented developers and designers together actually isn’t as simple as many seem to think. One example is right out of that original blog post:
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Today an interesting blog post on Zend Framework has made to the Hacker News front page. I have to agree with the author - Zend Framework is an over-engineered piece of software.
A few years ago I was working full time as a PHP developer. Naturally, I had experimented with lots of frameworks, including CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana, Yii, Symfony and obviously, Zend Framework.
Over the years, I had developed many projects primarily using CodeIgniter and later on, Kohana. There was one project that was larger in scale compared to an average PHP project (whatever that means), so I decided to use Zend Framework to take advantage of its component-based structure.
The result? It was dreadful.
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Hiring is usually a long and difficult process - in order to streamline and simply it, I use Kanban to manage the whole process. I believe, hiring should be as lean and agile as our development process.
My Kanban board for hiring (we just started hiring at SitePoint!):
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If you are looking at hiring developers, check out my article on this subject.
The goal or the dream of working on your own startup is always full of excitement. And apart from some rare cases such as Dropbox, you probably need one or more co-founders to work with you on The Next Big Thing ™.
Problem is, how do you (as a non-technical co-founder) find us? Or more specifically, how do you talk us into working with you instead of some other billion-dollar ideas?
To answer this question, we need to first ask, is there a billion-dollar idea? The short answer is: NO.
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If you are looking at finding technical co-founders, check out my article on this subject.
In recent years developers become hotter and hotter - especially the good ones - they are hard to find, and they have plenty of employment options to choose from.
Some companies (or individuals who are seeking freelancers) go the extra miles to impress developers with attractive salary/rate and perks, which is nice. But surprisingly, many companies and individuals seem to have a habit of keep doing things that will annoy developers.
Over the years, I have personally encountered many situations that annoyed me as a developer. If you are looking for developers, here are a few things that I think you should be aware of.
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Holidays period is the perfect time to gear up and learn a thing or two from the masters - and as it turned out, reading Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup is one of the most exciting and joyful things I’ve done during the holidays.
In this book you won’t find long-winded and boring theories, instead the book is full of real world use cases and practical advices.
If you are an entrepreneur, or if you are responsible for product development, I urge you to read this book if you haven’t already. :)
After four days of sketching, designing and cutting up HTML/CSS, the new design (as you are seeing now) is finally live!
The new design is structurally similar to the old design, but with a fresh header and better use of space.
A new year warrants a fresh start. Apart from the redesign, I have also started heading up the development effort at SitePoint - dozens of interesting and challenging projects ahead!
2012 will be an awesome year! :)
A couple of days ago, a blog post titled “First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed!” has made to the Hacker News front page and has spawned some great discussion and debate.
Since I had just been screwed recently, I thought it might be a good opportunity for me to share what I’ve learnt.
After my story got picked up by Hacker News and some other sites, I was contacted by my client. It was a very interesting and surreal experience which included keywords such as sue, settle, donation and disappearance. I am however going to spare you the details and instead, going to focus on the things I have learnt.
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Today I noticed that I don’t have Skype installed, so naturally, I went to Skype.com. Then I was presented with their homepage:
The problem? No “Download” action button above the fold, or below the fold for that matter. That is, quite frankly, shocking.
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Update: I have blogged about the things I have learnt from this.
Last night, after some long overdue frustration, I have open sourced Angel Nest - an online platform for connecting entrepreneurs and investors, similar to AngelList.
Shortly after I open sourced my work, the news got picked up by Hacker News and went onto its front page. (Update: I was just informed that the story was picked up by Reddit as well.) The Github repository has since been followed by 250+ people and forked by 60+ times - it became one of the Github’s daily trending repositories.
Since then I have received many warm regards from fellow developers and entrepreneurs. Thank you so much guys! I will reply to each one of you as soon as I have a chance. :)
From the Hacker News comments as well as some of the comments received privately, there were a few questions raised, and I hope to address some of them in this blog post.
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