The Blog

The tag line I’ve been throwing around recently is that “I help make the business case for doing the right thing.” For the most part, my righteous indignation centers around how technology workers (the working caste) are treated by their executives (the...

Has your manager ever explained her position with something like: "Well, we talked about that 6 weeks ago"? Do you ever hear her say something like "I distinctly recall mentioning that to you"? If this rings a bell, it's because it's cut from the same cloth as your...

To be a successful tech lead, it stands to reason that you have to be a successful technician. When mentoring junior engineers, I break down the ultimate technician as the perfect balance of three profiles.

Daniel Gross just posted a brilliant opinion piece on slate.com where he predicts the ascension of Steve Jobs to the throne of the Disney empire. Robert Iger is Disney's calming, conservative successor to the legendary general Robert Eisner. His acquistion of Job's...

ComputerWorld just posted an anecdotal article about "How to Survive a Bad Boss". While ComputerWorld like to focus on the plight of the CIO, there are juicy tidbits that can be implemented by tech leads and team leads at all levels. For example, one manager used an...

Have you ever heard your PM refer to his staffing plan as an "inventory control sheet"? Sounds logical right? It's fairly obvious that you can simplify accounting by viewing people's billable hours as product inventory. However, what's dangerous though, is when you...

I was recently the tech lead on a project using Microsoft tools where one developer produced some code that was just hideous. So, like any diligent manager would do, I went back to coach him on the right way to do things. "I know you may have a preference for calling...

So I was handed the project plan and the edict "Make the date or die!" (ok, not quite, but something like that). With such an agressive schedule, we needed to know that at any given step, we were headed in the right direction. At this juncture, the Agile methodologist...