Best of Software Development in the Real World

We’ve had a lot of new readers to the blog lately which is fantastic.  We now receive over 30,000 visitors a month, over 3,500 RSS Subscribers, 1,200 developers signed up for the Software Development in the Real World Newsletter, and nearly 200 members on TwitterDevs.  With new visitors comes a problem, mainly the fact that new readers might have missed some of the articles I have written on here over the last few years. 

I was actually adding up the software development blog posts the other day and used a tool to count the words.  Nearly 89,000 words on this blog.  That’s a fairly detailed book with about 300 pages if you add images.

I’ve enjoyed every minute of running this blog, and meeting some of the most interesting people from all over the world.  I want to say a special thanks to all the loyal readers, because without you I would simply be talking to myself, and that’s not a lot of fun.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy some of the best articles that have been posted on software development, team management, and performance tweaking.  While there hundreds of thousands of software development blogs out there, I’ve tried to focus this blog on making developers the best they can be by bringing up topics that you might not think about during your day to day development careers.

The Best of Software Development in the Real World

Technical Transformational Leadership

What kind of leadership do you follow with your team? How do you present yourself within your organization? Technical Transformation Leadership is kind of the word I’ve coined for myself which explains the type of leadership I try and follow on a daily basis.  It’s merger of two styles of leadership that I have found work extremely well within a software development and technical organization. It creates a really collaborative fun environment where everyone clearly understands the goals and objectives of the long term vision, and work extremely hard to achieve it.

How to Rate a Software Developer

How do you rate a software developer?  That’s a fantastic question!  There are so many theories out there, and there are so many forms that HR teams try and come up with to help you conduct performance review.  However, what really makes a great developer?  And if you are a Software Developer, how can you improve your career today!  Below is my bible for rating the developers on my team.  By following these tips and rules, you will improve your status from “good developer”, to “great developer”!

The One Minute Software Development Manager

Being a Software Development Manager is a great job, if you are the right person for the job.  You have to have a real passion for technology and leadership to excel in this role.  I have spent the better part of the last 5 years studying leadership and software development, and have really enjoyed the journey.  Below are some of the key things I try and focus on day to day as I interact with my team.  Hopefully some of these points can help you!

How To Finish A Big Software Project And Be The Hero

We’ve all been there! The huge beast software project that just won’t end/die. In fact Microsoft is constantly getting themselves into this trouble.  Vista, SQL Server, XP, all became these huge projects, that in the end, had to have massive features cut, and new leaders appointed to save the day and ship products!  At the end of the day, if you are constantly building and building, and never shipping, you’re sunk!  How do you get a big software project out of the water and become the software development hero?  I’ll tell you how…

What Makes Version 1.0 Software Hard

I’m always puzzled by how hard software can be to write the first version of any software product.  Software in itself is always hard, for more reasons than I can write in a blog entry. But what makes Version 1.0 so hard?  I’ll give you a hint, most of it has nothing to do with your developers. It has more to do with the process of innovation.

How To Kill Your To Do List, Developer Style!

Are you one of those people that creates to do list’s, action plans, project plans, and seems to have millions of things to do?  There is actually a simple “Hack” you can use today to get your life back on track.  I just finished reading David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: Books: David Allen, and have taken some great ideas from the book!  I highly recommend reading it. Follow along with me on this journey to getting more stuff done than you ever imagined, developer style!

7 Key Attributes of High Performance Software Development Teams

There are so many people out there writing books about the best software development processes, tools, architectures, and so much more.  I woke up this morning wanting to concentrate on writing about the lower level as I see it to a High Performance Software Development team.  I truly see this as the essence to great teams, and great companies.  It’s simply not enough anymore to have the smartest people working for you.  You need to have smart people that embody the essence of your company.

How To Win Friends and Make Developers Happy

How to win friends and make software developers happy!  Sounds simple, however, as most of you will know, managing software developers is tricky business.  Making them happy day to day is even harder. It is true that just because you are a great software developer doesn’t mean you should be promoted to a manager. However, I strongly feel that if you have not been in the trenches, on death march projects, or simply do not understand the developer’s mentality inside out, you will be at a loss when trying to figure out this “special” bunch of people.

Software Development Top 30 Mistakes

I have been developing software and web applications for nearly 11 years now.  Software development has come a long way since the days of Binary, Cobol, etc.  What still fascinates me about software development is the same mistakes made before, are still made today.  Below are the top 30 Mistakes that are made within the software development process.  It’s amazing to see that none of these have anything to do with the language itself.

Who Wants To Beat Google?

How Microsoft can beat Google and win the Search Game.  It sounds like everyone wants to beat Google these days.  Great goal, but how do you do it?  Everyone seems to think they have the magic bullet! Microsoft was about to buy Yahoo! for over 44 billions of dollars!  They are investing billions in R&D.  But do they have the right approach?  Some people think you need more web pages indexed.  Some believe you need a better interface. I tend to think the answer is right under everyone’s noses, they just need to use a little bit more passion, focus, to get the job done.  But what should they be focusing on?  What should the vision be?

The 10 Commandments of Great User Experience Design

Starting a new software development project in the next little while?  Praying and hoping that it goes well?  Are you worrying about all the little software development intricacies like: Making sure you have a proper source control, ensuring you have a continuous integration environment, making sure you have great developers and making sure they are happy?  If you are, you probably haven’t remembered to pay attention to the most important part of the software development process.  The User Interface and the User Experience.

Creating Powerful PowerPoint Presentations

A word of caution for software developers that do not like presenting:  Do not read this article.  This article is meant to help the developers out there that have to deal with software presentations!  To those that get to go through the joys of presenting to large crowds, or small crowds, I really hope this guide helps you on your journey through creating a high impact PowerPoint presentation.

20 Tips to Improve ASP.net Application Performance

There are certain things you should take into account when you are developing your applications.  Over the last 12 years or so of working with asp and asp.net, I have learned to avoid and do certain things that increase your application performance by a massive amount!  Below are my top 20 tips to improving ASP.net application Performance.

The Complete List of Software Development Frameworks, Process’s, Methods, or Philosophies

There are so many software development processes, best practices, philosophies, and frameworks out there that I just wanted to create a complete reference list of valuable things to remember.  Note that some of these I recommend NOT using, however I have listed them so that we can ensure to remember what not to do.  However, you would be surprised how in some cases some of these practices are valid, even though they might see ridiculous.  Anyway, here is the list, and as always feel free to post your comments and I will try and review them and add the ones that are valid!

Ultimate Server-Side Web Development Cheat Sheets

Even before the other Ultimate Web Development Cheat Sheet Guide became popular on Digg and del.icio.us, I was working on another version focused around Server-Side technologies.  I was going to add them into the other list, but removed them.  I wanted to have a list that was more focused, and only had the best Server-Side Cheat Sheets.  Also please note while there are hundreds of cheat sheets for each area, I try and only list at most the top 10 in each area, otherwise it makes the guide useless with repeated data. This makes these guides much more useful than the old guides out there.

The Complete List of Ajax Tools

Ajax has really taken off over the last two years.  Ajax is really just the combination of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.  I actually remember almost over 5 years ago now working with XML and JavaScript to auto-magically update navigation bars from the database.  With the advancement of Ajax, new frameworks, utilities, and software packages have been built to make the production of Ajax web sites much easier.  Below is the complete list of these tools, and the only list you will ever need!  Please feel free to submit more sites in the comments below as they will be added!

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

Want to improve your Twitter Ninja skills?  Want to impress all your friends with your twitter abilities? Ever wondered how some of the Twitter elite do some of the crazy things they do with twitter? Whether you are new to twitter, or have been using twitter for a while, you are guaranteed to learn something new and cool in the next 5 minutes.

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