Overview

I tend to mentor people automatically when I'm in a team environment, as well as being keen to learn from other people (many thanks to Dr Rob Woodcock with whom I worked for 8 months in 2001-2002 and who is very likely the best project manager and team builder I've met or heard about).

I decided to start putting some of my better pearls of wisdom on this site, based on 20 years of experience mainly in software development, sometimes working alone and with people of a wide range in skills. (Yes, you're meant to take this rather arrogant statement as a bit tongue-in-cheek and I'm not pretending to be up there as a public authority like Joel. )

There's a common wisdom that the best way to develop software is to assemble a small team of excellent people. I believe in small teams but much of my work on software processes and API's has been for the mythical average programmer.

There are times when we are all average or even below-average programmers.

At 2am, after too much coffee or maybe after a fight with your spouse, news of a parent's illness...even the best of us struggle just to be Clark Kent.

Links

Debugging Techniques

Diary-driven development

OO Design - UML Examples

Paper-Prototyping Technologies

User Interface Design examples

What to do with a Group of Progammers at the start of a project