In preparation for a recent team offsite, I spent some time thinking about what I hold dear as a software developer. One idea I kept coming back to is the notion of balance. I see balance manifesting itself several ways in the work of a successful developer, some of which follow.Speed Versus QualityThe most obvious example is the balance of development speed and quality. When building software, it’s never a good idea to write code as fast as possible without any attention toward maintainability, just as it’s never a good idea to spend such an inordinate amount of time designing a...

Two years ago a small team at Google went public with their fledgling project - the Go Programming Language. They presented a language spec, two compilers, a modest standard library, some novel tools, and plenty of accurate (albeit succinct) documentation. They watched with excitement as programmers around the world began to play with Go. The team continued to iterate and improve on what they had built, and were gradually joined by dozens - and then hundreds - of programmers from the open source community.The Go Authors went on to produce lots of libraries, new tools, and reams of documentatio...

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “f...

After several years developing software, I have acquired a very a strong opinion on how software should be developed, I actually have come to the conclusion that everything boils down to 10 principles, that if well implemented, will make any software development successful.1.- Customer first.“If we don’t take care of the customer… somebody else will.”Customer first means focusing from a customer perspective on real value for the product being developed, other aspects as: contracts, requirements, technologies… should take a secondary role in the pro...

One of my long-standing issues with Microsoft is its inability to control the perceptions surrounding its own products. One of the biggest examples was during the Windows Vista years when, even after the product had been fully patched and worked fine, Apple continued to do a better job to define the image of Windows (compilation of ads here) than Microsoft did, costing Microsoft billions in lost revenue for the millions it saved on a strong advertising campaign. The firm has a history of being penny wise and pound foolish in this regard; saving money on expensive marketing that otherwise would...

Takeaway: Everyone seems to agree that IT is a tough field. But what does it take to overcome the adversities and become a successful IT pro? These qualities may be the key. I recently wrote a string of articles discussing various reasons to leave IT — and various alternative careers for dissatisfied IT workers. I received an amazing amount of feedback from readers who have always wanted to express similar sentiments. But that leaves out a huge swath of people: those who desperately want a career in IT, as well as those who are caught somewhere in Limbo, trying to...