My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder

There Are Potential Pitfalls With Overperforming Teams

Sammy Larbi — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:46:48 -0600

A great development team is an asset that gains you competitive advantage in the marketplace. They churn out features quicker than other teams, with higher quality code that contains fewer defects. You give them project after project and they routinely meet or exceed the deadline.

They're well known for hitting on all cylinders often enough to pull off seemingly miraculous feats of software engineering.

All is right in your world.

It's relieving to know you have a team you can trust, and your team members take pride in knowing that you believe so highly in their skills that you rely on them in the squirreliest of circumstances.

The pitfall shows itself when, instead of enjoying the benefits of such a team, you start to rely on those benefits. You start to assume the "firing on all cylinders" is the norm, and schedule accordingly. You let yourself believe those miraculous deliveries means you can put off important decision making until a week before they need to be delivered.

As long as everything goes good, you're in the clear. And it normally does. But what happens if someone gets sick or has a family emergency to attend to? What happens if your team just can't maintain that sort of intensity indefinitely?

You're going to be late. What's worse is you needn't have been so if you would have remembered to plan for things like that.

It's just a word of caution: don't assume perfection, even if empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

Comments?

The best Java language and platform IDE is going open source

Sammy Larbi — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0600

JetBrains recently announced that IntelliJ IDEA will be open-sourced and have an Apache 2.0-licensed version with the release of 9.0.

Those who've been reading My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder for a long time will know I totally love IDEA.

I haven't written software in Java for quite some time, and I don't normally do "news" posts, but I know enough of you are into Java, Groovy, and Scala to make this worth your while if the $249 was pricey enough to force you into using lesser Java IDEs. Now you don't have to.

Get it and I don't think you'll be disappointed. But don't wait until 10.0. As Cedric Beust pointed out (and I'm inclined to agree), "IDEA going opensource means that it will now slowly die."

I hope not, of course, but one has to wonder.

Comments?

Incompetence and Frivolity Make It Look Like You're Working Hard

Sammy Larbi — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:58:08 -0600

Good point, @QualityFrog. I hadn't thought of it because I come in early instead, for the same reason.

I'd really like to see a "Send Sometime In The Next 24 Hours" button in Gmail, but failing that, I'll just create a place for myself to store emails in a database until an hourly scheduled job sends them via Gmail at getdate() + rand()*23.

Comments?