• Use a Niko-niko calendar to gauge the mood of your team
  Rotate unhappy team members. If you keep making em do things that they hate, you risk losing good staff forever.
• Use burndown charts
  Burn down charts offer a nice way to visualise project status.
  ….but dont make your team members track every minute of there time. Let your team members do what they are good at! A good PM will have a good sense of status without needing a time tracking tool.
• Kanban boards rule
  You just need a whiteboard with post it notes under 3 colums - Todo, Doing and Done

Much better than your Pert and Gantt friends!

Yep — somebodies built a Mindstorms Robot to solve Rubics Cube! Don’t believe me - heres the vid to prove it.

Time to start reading the Desire2Learn patent blog….

It’s a trial by Jury and will take approx 2 weeks!

Can’t wait till March for the verdict!

DHH makes a lot of sense in his post entitled - “Years of Irrelevance“. I’ve applied for lots of jobs, many of which required a few years of specific platform or framework knowledge. I’ve not quite agreed with the “You must have 2 years of Spring and Hibernate” attitude. Firstly, I’ve always been willing to adapt to the technology used by a company, if I thought they were building something special. Secondly, there is a certain excitement about learning something new, a certain acceleration in productivity, a certain creativity. Thirdly, generic experience and problem solving abilities are more important. Fourthly, it does not take long to transition to a new technology - it is a great myth that you should be 100% productive from day 1. Essentially sometimes programmers know something so well that they stop pushing the boundaries and become slow at adding new functionality.

Update: Jeff Atwood reflect a similar sentiment in his post entitled: The Years of Experience Myth.

It’s not often that I read an edu blog and agree 100% with the authors views.  Well I am pleased to say that I agree 100% with Michael Staton’s views on the current state of blast from the past edu tools and why refreshing change is about to occur. Micheal’s Blog is Edumorphology - I highly recommend that you add it to your feed reader now! I should mention that Micheal Staton is also the creater of Courses on Facebook - an LMS built on the Facebook platform.

aka - Why being a software/web developer sucks right now?

I’ve come to realise that the lifespan of software/web applications is approximately 8 - 12 years. Put into perspective this means that software developed between 1998 - 2000 is now being replaced. As a developer there is a big difference between being involved with a project to develop new software (functionality, features, whatever) as opposed to just rebuilding every feature in a short timeframe or even worst having to replace a custom in-house built masterpiece (spaghetti code and all) with an off the shelf product. I admit that I like to build and design software from scratch — its just more exciting. …..But if we must replace software because it is built with an out of date technology, we better make sure that we are building something that will last for at least the next 8 - 12 years. At the moment I am not sure this is possible! Web development frameworks and technologies seem to be in a state transition.

Let’s take a look:

• In .NET Land
  Lots of asp apps exist, even 7 years after the release of .NET. Should you transition to ASP.NET 2.0 or would it be wiser to let the new MVC framework and ORM techniques such as Linq to SQL stabilize first?
• In Java Land
  From EJB to Spring + Hibernate. But what if you head back to EJB 3 or 4 and JPA in the next few years? From Struts to ? - I am not sure what the leading web framework for Java is at the moment? Maybe give Wicket or something like Grails a try?
• In Ruby Land
  Rails stills sets the pace for streamlined productivity but will only be enterprise ready in a year or 2. ….by enterprise I mean bureaucratic companies/departments that are slow to install Ruby and slow to add servers that would allow Rails apps to scale! The ‘Enterprise’ should not be mistaken for the ‘Worldly Web App’ - a space Rails is already proven in. Rails is still evolving and 2007 has seen the emergence of more Ruby web frameworks eg Merb.

So the question is, in transitioning to a new technology, framework or off the shelf software product are you sure that it will go the distance?

….And you better make sure that the off the shelf product that is replacing something custom built is not built with out of date technology from the same era. A sure sign of this is the use of framesets. I wont mention software names here but yeah some elearning products dictate the use of frames - bring on HTML 5!

I had to read Michael Feldstein’s post on Blackboard appearing in ads with search keywords of “open source lms” twice. Hard to believe that this could be true! Blackboard and all of the other LMS’s that appears in the ads are not Open Source!