bridgetroll

In my experience, it is normal practice to factor time into the estimate (call it risk factor if you want) to push your skills. You factor a profit margin into your estimate right?

As long as the customer is satisfied with the overall quality, cost and timeliness of the product, you've met your obligations as a business. Why does the "profit" always have to be only cash? learned skills are a form of capital reinvestment that the customers pay for just like they pay you a profit margin to do the work.

These appliances are connected devices, which means that all they need to be are small wireless dumb terminals. Increases in bandwidth and improvements in distributed computing (cloud computing to be buzzword compliant) will make this even more so.

I work on DoD projects with varying project reporting requirements. There are many methodologies and processes one can follow. I've experiences success with Capability Maturity Model Integration and Agile (others here have mentioned agile too). There's an ongoing "meeting of the minds" of merging CMMI with Agile in the defense space.

For estimation, learning a bit of earned value management system (EVMS) can be useful. There is COCOMO II for estimation, but I don't think you need to go there for small projects.

A book I've found useful is "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" by Steve McConnell. Its helped me.

The secret sauce is to find that knife's edge balance of infrastructure (accountability and management) versus flexible productivity.

Then there is always the Scotty Principle.

godaddy (blindsided with fees) did the same thing to me. I've started using namecheap, as it was a few cents cheaper and the interface is an order of magnitude cleaner.

If what you used was for bug tracking it would be clearquest, rational clearquest. A program only the darkest souls of the empire would embrace.

I was held at gunpoint (exaggeration) and had to administer it. Note, this was a 7 year old version of clearquest at the time.

JIRA is clunky but it is effective. I ought not say more as it would be impolite.

I've had to formally evaluate bug tracking and issue tracking systems. They all suck to one degree or another as each has a fatal flaw, in my honest opinion. I probably ought to write a blog entry on the trackers I evaluated and the level of spam that the commercial versions send out to evaluators.

I made sloppy link insert as a comment in haste, no real purpose or reason. I must have come into the discussion through user comment history from another article and thought the topic was on that other article. In essence I was replying just to the commenter and not the overall posted article.

Isn't it more that the Yahoo! board would not meet Microsoft's terms of stock price? From what I've gotten out of the noise, any "reasonable" board would have accepted the price, it was attractive. They instead effectively said "we'll only accept for a bit more," knowing (or guessing) that the "bit more" is not an acceptable price. If my judgment is in error here, please show me the way.

Why, why, WHY does it seem that everyone wants to boil life's little gems into soulless powerpoint slides???

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint]

The boiled down life's lessons in a minute essentially suck the nectar, the subtle and gentle breeze of a late spring reading out and leave us with a husk, a shallow shell.

Trying to extract real context out of a summary of "How to win friends and influence people" is like saying Michelangelo was this artist dude who made a naked man statue he called David. and leaving it at that.

Go read the book. I did. It changed how I interact with people. The book is genuine, its not a quick fix instant gratification job. It is about how other people do matter and how we can help them help us by understanding their needs, their desires. Dale's book is about recognizing how you interact with others and how to make fundamental changes in yourself to be stronger socially.

I stumbled upon this link while digging around for some history on Interleaf:

http://oldvw.stores.yahoo.net/com.html

http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Just strap your laptop to the steering wheel and put the seat back.

You use JIRA too? What do you think of it?

The title sounds like a metaphor.

When I was a wee lad, my grandmother said "Learn something new every day."

On the topic of SBCL: A few days ago I downloaded SBCL 1.0.13 on my WinXP laptop and have been playing around with it to get back into Lisp. So far its worked to go through some exercises. I'm using Paul's "ANSI Common Lisp" book which I needed for one of my CS programming classes years ago. Last serious Lisp programming I did was at Interleaf, when they were Interleaf, so I've got a lot of cobwebs to brush off. I've got some specific tools I want to implement, so I'll probably run into issues with the incomplete port and if I can carve out the time, have no problem helping out.

I'm new here. I don't know anyone. I found HN purely by accident on a google search. I get a lot out of this site and am trying to contribute constructively.

I apologize if I'm pointing out the obvious but a major risk of making HN a gated community is blocking out new ideas and prospective startup hackers.

Anyone for Cuivre Reserve Château Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga?

http://www.phespirit.info/montypython/australian_table_wines...

In the article, the author poses the question of what is "worst" and never does properly answer this. Then goes on to list the "worst" bugs without proper criteria. The title should be "What Simson Garfinkel thinks are the 10 worst bugs, in chronological order."

Is there anything in the Twitter terms which preclude selling an account?

When I first read the headline, I thought the poster meant "taking a writing test" like taking an exam.

Thanks for sharing. We do test first on one of the projects I've recently joined. The project uses JUnit for unit tests and integration tests, Maven for automated builds, JIRA for tracking, and Subversion. The project manager keeps things simple, no heavy process. Also, We're a geographically distributed team.

I half expect to find Waldo if I search the poster well enough.

I have it posted at my desk in a nameplate frame. I try to adhere to it. I often fail.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"LISP has a partially justified reputation of being more based on theory than most computer languages, presumably stemming from its functional form, its use of lambda notation and basing the interpreter on a universal function."

- John McCarthy, LISP - notes on its past and future (Page 1)

Conference on LISP and Functional Programming archive Proceedings of the 1980 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming table of contents Stanford University, California, United States Pages: .5 - viii Year of Publication: 1980

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=802782&dl=ACM&...

A philosophical AI class? Please elaborate. I took an AI class for my CS degree and it was technical.

What do you mean by "big language?" Importance (a subjective value) or most widely used (overall or for specific domains) or something else?

Lisp is a functional language, c is an imperative language. Wouldn't a language "in the middle" risk being a compromise, effectively diminishing or negating the advantages of each?

This style strikes me as similar to higher forms of database normalization. The efforts generally outweigh the benefits.

Keep politics on the agenda. I mean talk about it, make it a part of normal conversation for positive reenforcement. Politics will creep in, but keeping it positive and light should help (but won't prevent) to keep bad feelings from taking dominance. You're a team, play for the team.

EDIT: On some more reflection: Try to honestly assess yourself and how YOU interact with other people. Are you a positive influence? Do you facilitate cooperation and openness? You, as a founder, are a significant (if not the primary) role model in your company.

From the article, I recognize that the author is differentiating programming, that is to me "coding" from all the other activities in the software development lifecycle, as he mentions in his third paragraph. I assume that many of you also recognize this, but that some might not. I bring this up because in replying back to the point of the article and whether or not we "know how we program" it is important to define what we mean by programming and what boundaries we place in the activity "programming" which is different than the activity "design" or the activity "testing."

I don't mean to troll, but why, as a student, would I want to pay more to get hardware from you instead of ordering from newegg or amazon for that matter or going down to best buy?

How are you going to keep the margins to stay in business? Are you planning on hiring employees or run a sole proprietorship? How much a square for lease? What do you do about the leach customers that want everything for free that suck up your time? There are a ton of questions to answer if you are going to brick and mortar. I had a friend do it. I've experienced it first hand. I will never do it. But good luck to you if that is your dream.