There’s already a good amount of discussion out there about the need to take breaks to give your body – eyes, wrists, back, etc. – a rest, but not much about how to properly take a break without it messing with your flow. A lot of programmers seem to be in touch with the idea [...]

It’s really, really easy to be lazy. If you’re primed to be lazy – and I think most programmers are – then all you need is a little push in the right direction. Or the wrong direction. If you can find any excuse to take the easy way out, you probably will. What they found, [...]

I was first exposed to this concept when I developed my project planning tool. It came about as an extension to a project we were working on. I was unhappy with the existing process, and went about fixing it, as I generally don’t like to leave broken things unfixed. It’s why I automated the planning [...]

There is a brief period of time between a project’s infancy and its maturity where documentation is, at best, scarce. For some projects, it lasts for a couple months; for others, until the first official release; and for others still, approximately eternity. But if all you proponents of proper programming practices truly believe that the [...]

A boss of mine once told me, “Sometimes getting something done quickly takes precedence over doing it right”. I’d argue that “quick” and “right” are the same thing in this context; it’s simply a pitting of the long-term against the short-term. Consider the time it actually takes to get things truly done. Well, yeah, I [...]