Recently, I read Ben Nadel's post of his thoughts stimulated by a book that we both seem to be reading, Drive by Daniel Pink. Ben is thinking about the best way of compensating workers. It's a great read with lots of comments. It reminded me of how I stumbled into something that I had pretty much forgotten about -- and I wonder if it would work in a different context.

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We're looking to hire some developers. The first person I thought of was my friend, Ben Edwards. In talking with Ben, he had an unusual -- and I think brilliant -- idea about resumes: kill them all.

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For an upcoming, large job, I did a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats". It's a formalized way of assessing both the business opportunity and one's abilities to leverage the opportunity. (Sorry for the market-speak...) SWOT is helpful in thinking realistically about one's strengths and weaknesses -- and it is a more formal way of doing something that I've undertaken for years with clients: the pre post-mortem.

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I spoke with a friend recently who told me that his company had just hired another programmer to keep up with the work. Good problem. Bad solution.

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Yesterday, I inadvertently made public a draft of an unfinished post I was working on. You can read the first part of the post here. Today, we finish the story.

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Many years ago, I worked on a construction crew on Cape Cod. The builder, Bill, was an old guy with tons of experience and a great reputation. He built high-end custom homes for people with money. And one day, I learned a lesson from him that has served me well when I became a developer of high-end custom software applications.

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On Saturday morning, I had to tell Liz Frederick, organizer of CFUnited that I would not be able to attend. I was very disappointed as I was looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones, but the decision was a simple, if not easy, one.

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Over the last eight days, my colleague, Maciej, and I conducted an experiment in pair-programming. The experiment was inspired by a terrific piece on pair-programming by a highly-respected Java guru, Elliott Rusty Harold. (You can find his article here.) I've done pair-programming in the past, but never rigorously and so wasn't sure whether my affinity for it was justified. Today we concluded the experiment and discussed what we thought of it.

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"We have a 3.00 at Maduro's with a new prospect for a big job," my partner told me recently. The word, "Maduro's" caught my attention: it's a cigar bar just minutes away from our office. I get to do a sales call while smoking cigars? Cool!

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Yesterday, we looked at some simple server code that is called by events generated on the client. We saw that the server returns an EVENT property in its response -- but that my example never uses it. Today, we're going to see how that is used -- and why I think EDP is a BigDeal(tm).

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