Month: August 2006

Manager’s main skill – empathy

If you enjoyed those articles, here’s another one for you from Stevey’s Blog Rants. It’s caled (Not) Managing Software Developers

However, I’ll offer you one almost magical tip that can help you smooth over nearly any mistake, a tip that can get you through just about any bad situation. I’ll tell you the tip right now, with no fanfare or ado. This hint is the most important one I’ll offer you today. It’s the secret ingredient to Great Manager Sauce. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to learn. You either already understand it, down in your bones, or you have years of head-scratching ahead of you. The tip is just one word: Empathy.

It’s a nice and easy read, with a whole bunch of useful quotes. And a lot of people linked to this post and followed it up – you can read their responses too.

GMail migration – done

I have finished my migration to GMail process. I have all my email archives uploaded, marked as read, and most of the messages labeled. Of course, as with any migration, there were some rough edges and few messages just didn’t make it through, while a few others were dumped into archives without being properly categorized. But overall I am happy. Those few messages that didn’t get through were probably useless anyway. And categorization is not vital anymore with Google search engine behind the inbox.

GMail usage for 15/08/2006

‘All Mail’ suggests that I have slightly more than 20,000 discussions. In terms of space usage, I am at 42% – 1156 MB used out of 2754 MB. That’s not too bad. My current new mail rate is not that high, and GMail is constantly increasing the size of the mailbox. I think it’ll be enough. If nothing else, I know how have a lot of stuff that I can delete to clean up some space. Some of the messages date as far back as 1999 – surely there’s something that I won’t even miss.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-08-14

The Rise of “Worse is Better”

The Rise of “Worse is Better” is a famous essay by Richard Gabriel – Distinguished Engineer and Principle Investigator at Sun Microsystems, which closely related to the “It’s Not Software” article that I’ve just blogged about.

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

Technology related reading – Steve Yegge

I’ve been pointed to the (now abandoned) blog of Steve Yegge way too many times. But for some reason I never read it. Maybe it’s the look of it. Maybe it’s because of the lengthy articles. But that’s a fact – I haven’t read a single post there until today, desipte the URLs being saved in those many places where I look for stuff to read.

Steve Yegge worked for several years (7?) at Amazon.com and last time I heard is still there, being a development manager for internal Amazon stuff. You can read more about him here, if you wish. By the way, he has also started a real blog too.

Anyway, today I discovered his excellent writings. It’ll take me some time to go over all of them, but here are the few really good ones from those that I’ve read today.

  • The Nonesuch Beast – rant about some irreducibly complex problem domains that people think are “simple”.
  • Practical Magic – thoughts about what a programmer is allowed to get away with not knowing.
  • Saving Time – rambling montage on productivity, emacs extensions, and automation habits. MUST READ.
  • The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions – an exposition on how he personally conducts the first 10 minutes of a technical phone screen.
  • It’s Not Software – an essay about differences between traditional software development and creating software services. This one is an absolute MUST READ.

There’s more, of course.