Although I’m not completely sold on the usefulness of Facebook Connect, it seems I can’t go a day without somebody asking me about it. Hence, as a little experiment, I’ve implemented the API here to allow you to make comments on this site with your Facebook account. What can I say, I can’t help myself.
Let me know what you think about Facebook Connect, and its many appications.
This post is slightly geekier, and more hands on than most of my recent posts, but it follows the same theme: efficiency.
The life of a developer is fraught with repetition. Minimizing said repetition makes me very happy. The other day I noticed that whenever I start working on a project I start with the following routine:
After these steps, the process diverges, but those first three steps are constant. I keep my project files well organized so I have a hope in hell of remembering where things are, so even changing directories to my working files follows a pattern (cd projects/projectname.com/working). Continue Reading
A multi-lingual project I’m currently working on requires a lot of converting foreign language characters into their HTML entities. After half an hour of doing this manually, I got fed up and created this little utility to do it automatically. Hopefully it comes in handy for someone else too.
Everything we do, day in and day out, can generate data, which can be leveraged to create better estimates. In fact, the more “stuff” we do, the more data we generate and the more useful it becomes.
Each and every one of us estimates poorly in our own unique way. Some of us over-estimate, some of us under-estimate, and some of us couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. However, we usually follow a pattern of some kind. The degree to which our estimates are off generally conforms to roughly the same proportions. If we were to examine a particular worker’s estimated task completion time to the actual completion time over the course of many tasks, we can determine the approximate factor to apply to his estimates to find the actual completion time. Continue Reading
No one likes to generate estimates. They trigger anxiety, frustration, boredom and are usually inaccurate anyway.
At some point in human history, estimates evolved into something more than what they’re intended to be. Perhaps we have shady contractors, auto garages, and wedding planners to thank for the modern perception that billing a client more than the estimated value means someone has been mislead, or taken advantage of. Or, perhaps it’s the fact that generating an accurate estimate is genuinely, extremely difficult — especially given that many estimates are expected to be delivered while there are still many unsolved variables on the slate. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of the fact that an estimate is really just your best guess, based on a combination of the information available at the time and your experience. Continue Reading
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