yegor256 podcast

Sometimes we have tasks in our projects, which nobody wants to complete. They are difficult or impossible to decompose, or simply too complex. What do we do in order to motivate our programmers to work with those tasks? We use Boost Factor, which is a multiplier of a micro budget. In other words, we use money in order to motivate programmers. We believe that professional programmers are motivated...

Most full-timers are afraid of showing their bosses that they find help at StackOverflow, because their managers expect them to be smart and know everything about the technologies they work with. Who would want to pay a full monthly salary to someone who constantly seeks help at StackOverflow, right? This is not the case with freelancers, on the other hand. Those who are paid by result are not req...

Most companies and managers believe that they have to check people before they let them get into the team, through a number of very complex interviews. After that, they trust their programmers and hope they will be motivated and committed enough to deliver the best results. Agile also suggests the same. I strongly disagree. We must not deliver our trust only once when we hire someone. We must cont...

I often hear a question: what is better, Agile or RUP? This question doesn't make a lot of sense since Rational Unified Process (RUP) is a framework with a large set of artifacts, processes, roles, and procedures; while Agile is a short list of philosophical points. I would actually strongly recommend you study RUP to understand software development (or even get certified). XDSD is our philosophy...

Technical debt is a huge problem, when it is, well ... huge. What usually happens is this: we start a project, we work on its "prototype," we wait until it is fully ready, and then we start thinking about unit tests, continuous integration, and build automation. But it is too late because the product already is too big. The problem is that we hold the product in the prototype mode for too long. I...

Most programmers feel uncomfortable realizing that their employer may replace them one day. To make this event less likely to happen they do many things in order to make themselves unreplaceable. One of those things is unmaintainable source code, which nobody else will be able to understand if its author is fired. I think that this mindset is not only toxic but also very typical for unprofessional...

I think that any repository, be it open source or proprietary, must have a single README file, which must include everything a new contributor needs to know about it: the product statement, the vision, the list of features and non-functional requirements, the list of technical decisions, which are important to know. Unfortunately, this file is very often forgotten, especially in non-OSS products....

We started reviewing software projects of other companies, just a few weeks ago and our first finding is that programmers don't pay attention to anything aside from the code they write. They don't have build automation, unit testing, static analysis, continuous integration, test coverage control, database versioning, and many other things which are supposed to keep the code together. It seems that...

The job of a good project manager is to organize the team the way that every team member wants to contribute and is ready to go through all possible obstacles and barriers, in order to make sure their results are accepted by the project. If the project manager has to chase programmers, ask them, beg them, and pull results from them, it is a bad project manager and the project is mis-configured. Th...

A software team where everybody expresses their opinions loudly and strongly, always being ready to admit that "I was wrong," is not able to produce anything serious. This is what I read in one blog post recently. And I do agree with this. However, I disagree with the solution suggested in the blog post. The author suggests programmers be more humble and skeptical, which I believe will only lead t...

When I start talking about 100% open source business model, most people wonder how is it possible to give away the entire source code base and still remain profitable, money wise. I think that any modern digital business has three components of success: the source code, the database, and the community of users, programmers, clients, and so on. If you make your source code fully open, you will only...

Do you want to be known in the open source world? If you don't, don't watch this video. If you do, there are eight things you should pay attention to when making a new GitHub repo: 1) make it small, 2) don't depend on other libraries, 3) make your README sexy, 4) write up a complete documentation, 5) ask everybody around to give you GitHub stars, 6) release it, 7) configure continuous integration,...

Very often software project sponsors complain about the low quality of their programmers. They also say that changing the team doesn't really help. They believe that it's possible to hire the "right" people and everything will be great. This is a myth. Instead of expecting your people to be great, you should control their results, by auditing it with an external expert. I'm suggesting you find suc...

I created a simple Ruby library just about two weeks ago: https://github.com/yegor256/iri. I already have more than 60 GitHub stars there. How did I do that? I just published it where I usually publish my open source libraries. There is no secret. I just create them, publish and then some of them (!) become popular. You should do the same. Every time you see an opportunity to make a small piece of...

Most companies and project managers feel proud of spending a lot of money for finding programmers, training them, getting them on board. They tell me very often that programmers are their valuable assets and they don't want to lose them since they invested so much into them. That's a terrible approach, which is only disrespectful to us programmers. We are not your property or your assets. We want...

It is a well-known fact that Lines of Code (LoC) is a very inaccurate metric for a software developer. It doesn't demonstrate anything and can't be used to measure the progress of a programmer or a number of efforts the programmer puts into the source code. However, there is another metric called Hits-of-Code (or Code Churn), which is calculated differently and perfectly indicates how much time or...

Most programmers think that writing code is enough to be useful for a software project. It's not true, especially now, when projects are becoming smaller and teams are more distributed. A modern programmer must understand all the processes and phases of a software development lifecycle. The best way to learn them all, if you ask me, is to study the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The video is here...

Most people ask me why exactly I think it's important for a software developer or an architect to be a blogger and stay active on Twitter, for example. I believe, and most recent practical cases prove that a well-connected and "visible" software architect would bring a lot more value to a project than someone who just knows how to write code. The video is here: https://youtu.be/l-bM2XyhlkQ

Risk Driven Development is a powerful concept, which may help you prevent many bad things in your project. Unfortunately, many teams don't know how to do it right. I'm going to publish an online tool for that soon, which will be used by Zerocracy and for anyone since it will be free and open source. The book by Rita Mulcahy: http://amzn.to/266pAYB (you must read it!) Zerocracy is here: https://www...

Microtasking, in order to work properly, requires a certain amount of discipline. First of all, all tasks and communications about them have to happen in tickets. However, our customers are far from being disciplined enough to use tickets for every requirement they have. Instead, they make phone calls, chat with us online, and send emails. I believe that is the responsibility of an architect to ma...

Very often our investors and users ask us why Zold has master nodes, even though it claims to be decentralized and anonymous. I answer that I can't imagine a serious cryptocurrency without a certain amount artificially created master nodes, which help it survive when it is still young. Without them, it will be possible to destroy us easily, just by a majority of hardware, which is not that expensi...

Many startup founders think that by sharing equity with programmers or giving them annual bonuses according to the overall result of the company, they can motivate them to work better. This is a wrong idea because programmers can't control those things. They can control the quality of their code, the speed of its delivery, their unit tests, their build pipeline, and other technical things. By rewa...

Every time someone comes to me for a piece of information, I ask myself: "Why? Isn't this information available in our documentation?" And if the answer is "No," I try to improve the documentation, to make that piece of information visible and accessible, to avoid future requests of the same kind. You should do the same. Don't train anybody, don't teach anybody. Instead, write tutorials. Help your...

Very often my readers complain about me saying that programmers must be in conflict with testers, or code reviewers in conflict with programmers, and so on. They claim that a good software team must have everybody going along and share the same set of objectives. They say that we should work "together," not against each other. I strongly disagree with that. I believe that good management means org...

Being a freelancer and charging $100 per hour, switching projects every few months and living in Bali, sounds like a dream for many programmers. But the question is, how to get there? Where can one get experience and training? Does it seem that the only way to learn to programme is to work somewhere as a full-timer? Yes, why not. Most of you will remain full-timers, but some of you will become fre...