Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code

by Jeff Atwood

traditional carrot-and-stick incentives are only useful for repetitive, mechanical tasks. The minute you have to do anything even slightly complex that requires even a little problem solving without a clear solution or rules — those incentives not only don’t work, they make things worse!

Success is rarely determined by the quality of your ideas. But it is frequently determined by the quality of your execution.

Software developers think their job is writing code. But it’s not.* Their job is to solve the customer’s problem.

for (target customer) who (statement of need or opportunity) the (product name) is a (product category) that (key benefit, compelling reason to buy) unlike (primary competitive alternative) our product (statement of primary differentiation) Creating a product vision statement helps teams remain focused on the critical aspects of the product, even when details are changing rapidly.

The golden reference standard for building a fast website remains Yahoo’s 13 Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site from 2007.

Somehow, they’ve forgotten that what software developers do best is learn. Employers should be looking for passionate, driven, flexible self-educators who have a proven ability to code in whatever language — and serving them up interesting projects they can engage with.

If you can’t fit your meeting in about an hour, there is something deeply wrong with it, and you should fix that first. Either it involves too many people, the scope of the meeting is too broad, or there’s a general lack of focus necessary to keep the meeting on track.