Nate Taylor

If everyone acted like an adult, most of us would be out of jobs. Curtis Stalnaker

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/ I first saw this cartoon about 3 years ago while we were in the midst of an SAP migration, as well as 2 other internal apps being rewritten. I was the lead (okay, time to be honest, I was the only) developer on one of the apps, that sadly looked  a lot more like ...

As I do almost every day, I was reading my favorite development blog on Tuesday.  He had a link that was simply titled Agile Software Is a Cop-Out. That definitely piqued my interest.  It had a captivating title, and dealt with a subject that has mixed feelings (even for me internally) – project management and software ...

A lot of companies and software groups these days are “Agile” or are going agile.  Many people will espouse the downfall of the waterfall method and all that was evil within it.  A lot of them will not even understand why it’s wrong.  I often wonder how many people doing Agile actually understand the principles. ...

“How much longer until it gets here?” I asked.  I was bored, hungry and past impatient.   My mom answered that the food would be at our table before too much longer. “But what’s taking so long?” “This is a nice restaurant. They want to give us time to talk, and enjoy the scenery.” “But ...

Today I was out playing on LinkedIn and came across a developer in my town who used to work at a friend’s company, so I checked him out.  I was looking at his website and reading a few entries of his blog.  One thing caught my eye. Apparently, he’d recently been laid off, and was ...

“That department of about 5-10 people creates enough work to employ about 200 people” That was a comment my dad had made to me one summer day while I was working at the same company.  He was talking about the 5-10 engineers that he managed.  The designs those guys did kept all the manufacturing people ...

I’m certain that about this time, I bunch of people are asking “but, did you implement DVCS”.  The answer is no, not yet.  You still can’t checkin while you are offline.  And you can’t do history or branch merges, etc.  Certain operations do still require you to be online.  You won’t get big long hangs ...

“What do you know?” That question was asked constantly in my elementary physics class.  It was a flunk-out class (a class designed to thin the herd at my engineering school.)  The thing was, the professor had a pattern he wanted you to follow when solving problems in his class.  First, draw a diagram.  Second, write ...

I’ve seen developers put in long, grueling hours on a special project.  Watched them burn the candle at both ends.  Seen the exhausted look in their eyes after a stretch of 60 or 70 hour weeks.  Then, when it’s all over and we talk, I’ll inevitably hear someone say “Well, I’m just happy to have ...