Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies

Every couple of years, my friend Tom DeMarco turns the computing world upside down with a new book. Sometimes he writes alone (see, for example, Slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency and The Deadline: a novel about project management). Often, he writes with our mutual friend and colleague, Tim Lister [...]

Michael Krigsman interviews me

Michael Krigsman, a well-known ZDnet blogger, interviewed me on the phone last week for his Naked IT series, and wrote up a summary of the results. I’m not going to summarize his summary, other than to reassure you that I wasn’t naked in the interview. It’s easier to just point you to it — click [...]

Free webinar tomorrow on “Managing Death-March Projects”

I’ll be presenting a 90-minute Webinar on “managing death-march projects” tomorrow — specifically, Tuesday, November 27th from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Eastern Standard time. You can already see the presentation materials on Google Docs (look on the “my presentations” tab of my blog), but the Webinar will have the additional benefit of my talking [...]

Free Webinar on “Managing Death-March Projects”

I’ll be presenting a 90-minute Webinar on “managing death-march projects” next week — specifically, Monday, November 27th from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Eastern Standard time. You can already see the presentation materials on Google Docs (look on the “my presentations” tab of my blog), but the Webinar will have the additional benefit of my [...]

Hello Austin: here’s V07 of my “Top Ten Software Engineering Concepts” presentation

For the “Software Best Practices” seminars where I’ll be speaking in Austin tomorrow, I’ve made a substantial number of updates and refinements to the material that I presented in Ft. Lauderdale a couple days ago. The material is fundamentally the same as before, but I’ve added a couple more recommended books, papers, and articles — [...]

Hello, Ft. Lauderdale: here’s V06 of my “Top Ten Software Engineering Concepts” presentation

For the “Software Best Practices” seminars where I’ll be speaking in Ft. Lauderdale and Austin this week, I’ve provided several different ways of downloading the presentation materials. None of the material is copyrighted; it’s all “open source,” and you’re welcome to use it, modify it, share it with friends and colleagues, and collaborate with me [...]

New version of Top Ten Software Engineering Concepts

I’ve just uploaded a new version (v05) of my “Top Ten Software Engineering Concepts” presentation to slideshare.net; to access it, click here. I’m working on making it available as a Google Apps presentation document, and also a downloadable PDF document; hopefully that will all be available in the next couple of days …

Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas, Albany-style

I’m participating in a “Software Best Practices” seminar in Albany tomorrow (click here for details on future venues of this seminar, hosted by IT Metrics & Productivity Institute — including Ft. Lauderdale and Austin next week), and I’ll be giving a talk on the “Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas.” To download the 20.5-megabyte PDF of [...]

Leading Geeks

I brought along an interesting book on my trip to Rome last weekend, and thought I’d recommend it to those of you who have the good luck, or bad luck (depending on your perspective) of managing geeks. The book is Leading Geeks, by Paul Glen; it’s about 250 pages of straightforward reading, and qualifies reasonably [...]

Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas, in Jacksonville

I‘ll be giving a presentation on the “top 10 software engineering concepts” at an ITMPI software best-practices seminar in Jacksonville, FL today; for more details about this and future seminars (including, for example, Albany and Austin next month), click here. If you’d like to download a 18.4-megabyte PDF of the one-page mind-map for the presentation, [...]