Entries Tagged 'Software Development' ↓

Regular reader (and former co-worker from 8 years back) Matt Youell posted the following comment on my post about moving to Boston:

Do me a favor and post on how you move your tech stuff. I just did a modest 600 mile move back in January and it was a pain in the ass. My computers made it intact but then getting set back up, getting services, etc. was a real struggle. Of course I hadn’t moved in almost 7 years, so I was pretty entrenched. I’d love to know how you manage with all your moving.

Matt and I emailed a few more times on the subject, and he brought up some specific problems he ran into during his move that I’ll discuss below. Having moved 9 times in 7 years I’ve gotten pretty good at staying lean in the “stuff” department, and staying mobile with my technology.

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I write this post with mixed emotions. I acquired DotNetInvoice (DNI) 15 months ago, fixed loads of bugs, added 50+ features, provided support, turned the customer base around (they were close to mutiny), and grew revenue by 6x. This program has become part of me as much as any code you work with for over a year. My intent was to turn it into a full-time Micro-ISV, but it appears that life has other plans.

I’ve come to realize over the past year that the time I’ve spent developing and supporting DotNetInvoice has virtually replaced the time I used to spend working on my blog. Long-time readers will notice that my posting frequency dropped pretty substantially at the start of 2007 (due to my acquisition of DNI).

Debating this internally for the past several months has forced me to evaluate my goals and plans for the future. Through this I’ve decided to invest more time into growing this blog, and into an opportunity that I’ve been chasing for years (more to come later)…all of this means I have to make sacrifices to create room in my life.

So I’m selling DotNetInvoice.

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I received the following email a few weeks ago:

I graduated with an MIS degree while serving in the Military. I took some programming classes like JAVA, C++ etc… I am now back in Boston, MA and find it difficult to find employment where I can learn to become a better programmer. I don’t have the experience but I am willing to learn. Can you please provide me with some direction on what to say on my resume, to gain the experience in the civilian workforce so I can become a better programmer?

My response:
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Many a moon ago (nearly two years), I had a funny and somewhat sad email exchange with a co-worker named Matt. We had a lot of exchanges along these lines, and in a fashion atypical of this blog I wanted to share this one.

The situation: I made a mistake on a set of Release Notes and he let me know he’d corrected it.

Me: Aaaargh. Sorry about that. Getting sloppy in my old age.

Matt: Don’t sweat it. I’ll send corrections when I come across them. If this was the only thing wrong with any release notes I get, I’d be a happy man.

Me: Thanks…but wait, you forgot the protocol:

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I received this email the other day:

I’m looking for a software developer to build a simulator program.

Payment would be made from revenues after the product is available and producing revenues. The estimated market for this product is 100 million users with a target price of $50 per unit. After all your development costs have been covered from revenues, we would then share the proprietary rights to the product and net revenues on a 50/50 basis.

Are you interested in continuing?

My reply:

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In case you missed Gates VP’s comment about The Fallacy of Management on my recent post Q & A on Leaving Management for Development, I’ve re-printed it below:

===

I have a working theory that I’ve titled The Fallacy of Management.

The basic definition is that current managers would have us believe that the work they do is the very reason for project success and therefore they believe (and have convinced others) that their’s is the most important role.

The real truth is that most managers are just overhead, projects would likely self-assemble without them, especially with good devs on the job. However, companies do things like targeting management for bonuses and taking other steps to make management a “position of privilege.” The truth is, good managers don’t deliver projects on time, good programmers deliver projects on time and managers just guide the process.

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I’ve received several emails about my post Why Good Developers are Promoted Into Unhappiness. One reader asked some interesting questions on his quest to decide between development and management.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

Q: Does leaving management for coding greatly cut your salary?
Going back to coding may cut your salary, but it’s quite possible it will not. In my case, the first time I went from management to coding I was fortunate enough to move into a higher paying development position. The second time I didn’t receive additional money for my “promotion” into running a development team, so going back required no monetary sacrifice.

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I relocated from Los Angeles to Connecticut a few months ago, and a few of my geekier friends joked that I had to meet Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham before I came back to California.

Joel is in the midst of his 21-city FogBugz World Tour and one of his first stops was in New York City, where I saw him demo FogBugz 6.0 two weeks ago. In fact, in the picture at the top of Joel’s post about the session, you can barely see my head peeping out over the guy with the black shirt and white stripes on the left side. Those stinking paparazzi never leave me alone.

FogBugz 6.0
The demo went well; it wasn’t spectacular, but it was a good 40-minute overview of FogBugz’s main components: a wiki, forums, bug tracking, and scheduling. But it didn’t need a big flashy presentation - the application itself is seriously impressive.

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My startup history goes back a few years.

In 5th grade I sold comic books to my classmates at a 30-40% markup. I was a voracious marketer; I handed out homemade flyers, created checklists so customers could see “at-a-glance” which issues they needed, and even started a subscription service. Whenever kids in my school had extra money the first thing they thought of was buying comics.

In 8th grade I sold candy at a 500-800% markup because kids couldn’t buy it within walking distance of school. I made money hand over fist, and quickly learned that you should re-invest your profits instead of purchasing DJ equipment that you think will make you cool, but will actually collect dust in the back room of your house because you never spend the time to perfect your cross-fade.

In high school I wrote a booklet about comic collecting and sold it through classified ads. Technically I broke even, but realistically I lost money on the 50+ unpaid hours I spent researching and writing. This was the first business I launched “in the wild,” and I learned a lot about what it takes to market a product in the real world (i.e., to someone other than my classmates).

During college I sold $5,000 worth of comic books on newsgroups and eBay (this was circa 1997, when eBay was still black and white and so slow you had to snipe 40 seconds before the auction ended or your bid wouldn’t hit the servers in time). This business funded my entertainment expenses for two years. I had many Silver Age books that were some of the few copies for sale on the internet at the time.

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When I was a coding newbie I thought applications should never crash. I wrote code that caught and ignored errors because I didn’t know how else to handle them. I didn’t want the user to see an error page, and figured a running application was always better than an error page. Oh, how wrong I was. On one application alone (not written by me) I wasted 50+ hours over the course of a few months because of exceptions that were caught and not properly handled. Don’t let this happen to you.

I’ve found this mindset to be so common among new developers that I’ve distilled the basics down to two fundamental rules a new developer should follow to the letter. I’m exhausted with cracking open code and seeing a Try/Catch block with no action after the catch. Whether you’re using a language with actual exceptions is beside the point - what matters is that you read through these few simple paragraphs and never, ever obfuscate your application errors.

Picture this (in C#):

Try
{

‘ Application code here
}
Catch
{

‘ Do nothing
}

What happens when an exception is thrown from the application code? Nothing…and that’s a problem.

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