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The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
by Joel Spolsky Wednesday, August 09, 2000 Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. Of course, these are not the only factors that determine success or failure: in particular, if you have a great software team working on a product that nobody wants, well, people aren't going to want it. 1. 2. If the process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors. For this very reason, the last company I worked at switched from WISE to InstallShield: we required that the installation process be able to run, from a script, automatically, overnight, using the NT scheduler, and WISE couldn't run from the scheduler overnight, so we threw it out. 3. Read more about daily builds in my article Daily Builds are Your Friend. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
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Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College Students
For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students. But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time. Taking Notes 1) Evernote Evernote is a great note taking application, but that only scratches the surface of what it can do. You can also use it to bookmark web pages and write down your own lecture notes. 2) Google Notebook The Google Notebook is one of Google's lesser know products, but, thanks to a very well designed Firefox extension, it's a great tool for when you do most of your work in a browser already. One additional nice feature is that you can invite collaborators to work on a notebook with you. Online Office Suites Bibliography
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
by Joel Spolsky Wednesday, October 25, 2006 A motley gang of anarchists, free-love advocates, and banana-rights agitators have hijacked The Love Boat out of Puerto Vallarta and are threatening to sink it in 7 days with all 616 passengers and 327 crew members unless their demands are met. The demand? A million dollars in small unmarked bills, and a GPL implementation of WATFIV, that is, the esteemed Waterloo Fortran IV compiler. As chief programmer of the Festival Cruise programming staff, you’ve got to decide if you can deliver a Fortran compiler from scratch in seven days. Can you do it? “Well, I suppose, it depends,” you say. On what? “Um, will my team be able to use UML-generating tools?” Does that really matter? “I guess not.” OK, so, what does it depend on? “Will we have 19 inch monitors? Again, does this matter? “I guess not. Right. “Who are they?” Does that matter? “Sure! Now we’re on to something! Don’t try to interview a bunch of people at the same time. Never say “Maybe, I can’t tell.”
New Relic : Application Monitoring
Full application stack visibility. Real-time, all the time. New Relic monitors every move your application makes, across the entire stack, and shows you what’s happening right now. Zero in on problems fast with transaction tracing, SQL and NoSQL performance analytics, application topology mapping and deployment history markers and comparisons. We support the following languages
Organizing a PDF library: Mendeley for information extrac
I’ve been using Zotero for awhile now. I make no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan. In early July I was testing out Mendeley to give a workshop with a colleague who’s been excited about it. I wanted to see whether Mendeley could reduce any of my pain points. While I’m not moving to Mendeley*, I do plan to take advantage of its whizz-bang PDF organization. I spend a lot of time reading and pulling materials into my library; I spend far less time organizing materials. I usually have a “to read” pile lying around. Zotero had a small point of failure: I expected “get PDF metadata” to be in the Preferences menu, but I had to look up its location on their website. Of my 44 test cases, Zotero says “No matching references found.” on 26 of them. Zotero’s ‘identification’ of the next article is even stranger: Capital, R. I wondered whether Mendeley was grabbing metadata from the files so I took a closer look at these two files. Mendeley does better but it’s not perfect.
