Don't blame the tools
In the past I have been involved in big projects, managed via tools like JIRA or Redmine. It wasn’t heaven. Convoluted processes, tons of emails, walls of text that nobody read. I used to blame the tools. I am changing my mind. Clearly a tool in itself can’t be responsible for a situation. It’s the usage that people make of it that generates happiness or frustration. Now there’s an argument to be made.
Old boring and battle tested tools
I have been listening to the Under the Radar podcast. More than once both Marco and David mentioned the phrase “old and boring” referring to the ideal tools to get a job done. I totally agree. I started prototyping AppVersion using MongoDB. Boy, upserting was fast! And so was I in writing code and adding features. Until it came time to deploy. I started having problems with random data losses and I was put off by the recommended setting to deploy at least 3 replica sets.
No SCM
I am not using a Source Code Management (SCM) system for my products, neither for AppVersion nor for Podrover. People look at me in a weird way when I say it. Here’s why. It’s just me. I am the only developer. There’s no need of sharing the code base with somebody. I save some time. Maybe not a lot. Maybe ten minutes a week. That’s a work day a year.
Let's Schedule a Call
I shiver every single time I hear that. Maybe I have just been unlucky but I have been involved in very weird situations. One time a guy had an old crappy PC, slow like hell. He had the great idea to buy a bluetooth headset. We spent usually half an hour to have a meeting that could have lasted five minutes. We talked in chunks of 20 seconds. That was the longest chunk because the headset kept dropping the connection to the device.