Here's 10 rules I came across for running a project. Interesting reading. I'm not a PM (although I'm a dev lead now on probably 2 projects, and some of the same principles are supposed to apply), but I must say that of the top 2-3 best PM's I've ever worked with, they exemplified and the bad ones missed the mark on most, if not all 10. I'd never really thought about what set them apart, but this article nails it for me.
This is a bit more like a press release, than a blog entry from someone at Sun, but I have to agree. The great part about working with Sun, and why I'd keep choosing them for many (but not all) places in any company I ran, is that there's someone who knows. Eventually your support call will end up at that person. I don't end up calling support often, but when I do, Sun is always my favorite to deal with.
Ooooh...InfoWorld has the top 6 myths of IT. I think I disagree with everything they say, and they don't even really put forth an argument so there's not even much to respond to. For example, when it comes to "Most IT Projects fail", they take a comprehensive study done of 13,000 projects (just one such study performed in the past 20 years) and attack it with a couple of anecdotal quotes from 3 different people. And still the best that they can come up with is, 50% of projects really fail to deliver significant functionality or features and 15% of those get cancelled or never delivered.
They also have a stunningly obvious graph showing that small projects succeed more often than large projects. Well duh. We've got 40 years of work in software engineering that shows as projects scale up, they get exponentially more complex and likely to fail. Thanks for the newsflash. I mean look at the more than 10 million entry; only 2% of projects succeed. Two percent. And I'd venture to say that projects in that range are the ones most critical to the business. Even at 15% of projects being cancelled outright, can you imagine if 15% of civil engineering projects were cancelled completely? People would be a little pissed if the bay bridge had a 15% chance of not getting finished.
Check out this view of failure:
But AMR’s Shepherd has another view, which he says is more realistic. “Failure would be a situation where orders stopped being taken, or the books couldn’t be closed, or the project itself was simply abandoned,” Shepherd says. “That’s rare."
Uhhh...how about if we define failure as the failure to either a) save more money than the project cost, b) increase revenue more than the project cost, or c) some combnation of the two to get back the project's cost. That should be the real criteria since that's the goal of the business.
Sigh. I hate our industry sometimes.
update: I'm sorry, "X doesn't scale" is a correctly identified myth. The author of that one actually knows something. Neat.
Here's a good guide for making long-lasting URL's.
I found CoversationYouCantStayAwayFrom on the C2 wiki today. I think my problem is that I can't stay away from any coversations...
Well now I know what the next step in the spam arms race is...no sooner do I install mtblacklist then I get nailed by some fucker posting links to a site not on the blacklist, and the text of the messages is random quotes about programming. At least they are cake to remove now. Still annoying though. Why don't these people just get real jobs, that actually contribute to society instead of sucking off the economy like leeches?
The real sad part to me is how much easier they have it than the people trying to defend against yet, yet spammers still basically suck at what they do. I can dream up tons and tons of ways to make auto-spamming software better at what it does, and rarely do I see them actually implemented. I guess I should be thankful, but it mostly fills me with disdain towards the actual authors of the crap.
I finally went ahead and installed MT-Blacklist. Pretty easy, seems to work well. I don't (as of yet) get tons of comment spam, so this will easily handle things. So no more penis-enlargement ads here. Can't wait to see what the next step in the arms race is. Too bad people just can't stop being assholes.
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