Welcome to Sideline.
Are you leading a software development team and having problems? Are you managing a software project and starting to get a bad feeling about the outcome? I've been there.
I've spent the last decade developing software and building teams that develop software. For the most part, I've even managed to be successful at it. This blog is all about the hints & tips that I've learned along the way. In addition, I'll probably chuck in some observations on the software development industry.
Read along!
I was recently looking for a nice way to back up MySQL on our staging server. A Google search brings up a bunch of different ways but I ended up going with some code from the data_sync plugin on GitHub.
read on...Let's just cut to the chase here: your developers aren't as productive as you (or they) would like because they are working on too many things at the same time and they don't always choose the right things to work on. It's often that simple.
One of my favourite lines to use is "if it hurts when you do that, stop doing that." Unfortunately, many software teams (and companies) don't follow this common sense advice. During the last year, I've started working with a couple of clients that both suffer from the same affliction: the devs can't finish anything.
The solution to this is actually pretty easy:
- Allow your developers to only work on one thing at a time
- Make it easy for your developers to know what they should work on next
Seems pretty simple, right? In fact, it seems simple enough that everyone should be doing it. But here's the problem - almost nobody is.
Up until recently, I hosted sideline.ca on Dreamhost using Wordpress. While Wordpress has been good, I've been feeling the need to use a simpler solution. Throw in my desire to move my hosting to something more Rails-friendly and it became obvious that I needed to leave Wordpress.
While Dreamhost has been cheap (less than $10/month), I wanted to do better in terms of cost. Something closer to...free.
read on...