Recently, I was commissioned by Vin 65 to write up a guide to hiring and cultivating great developers. They were generous enough to allow me to share it with everyone. It's much too long for a blog post, but here's the URL to the PDF: https://github.com/halhelms/Hiring-and-Cultivating-Great-Developers.

Debt is an agreement whereby we receive a good today in exchange for future payments. In recent years, the term "technical debt" has found widespread adoption to describe a similar situation involved in producing software.

The good we receive? Producing deployable software. The future payments? Greater difficulty in maintaining that software.

Deploying (or shipping) software is always a tradeoff. As such, we always accumulate technical debt. The problem is that we often misunderstand just how corrosive to a system technical debt is -- how much those "low, easy payments" are going to be and to what degree they will cripple new development.

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"Just once it might be instructive to pretend you're accepting an award for failure, just to see who you would thank." ~Robert Brault

There seem to be endless quotes related to failure. Many of them are a variation on "The only real failure is failing to try again." Heart-warming stuff. Encouraging. And dead wrong.

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A recent email asked for my advice: "Our 'team' has 9 developers. We're all doing our own separate projects. That seems bad to me. But my boss says it's more efficient. Is he right? If he's not, what can I tell him?" Hmmm...excellent question -- and in an area that I think the right decision can have a huge impact.

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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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