Knowledge Work

Well, I must say I’m enjoying the new MacBook. I still have a need to run a few Windows programs (Visio, Project), and so for the first few days this week I experimented with Apple’s BootCamp. This is a perfectly satisfactory solution, as long as you don’t mind shutting down and rebooting whenever […]

Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And “just around the corner” is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed […]

Many independent developers eventually find themselves in a situation where they must negotiate a contract for the first time, such as for a publishing deal. And many developers are taken advantage of on their first deal because of a lack of basic negotiating skills.
This article will attempt to give you a general understanding of how […]

If you’ve just been appointed technical lead (of anything), take ten minutes to read this.
Perhaps the most difficult job to do on any software development project is that of Technical Lead. The Technical Lead has overall responsibility for all technical aspects of the project - design, code, technology selection, work assignment, […]

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company’s president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.
At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate’s Web page with this description of his interests: […]

I have a spare laptop of recent vintage around the house, and had some time on my hands this weekend–Carrie was working; I, uncharacteristically was not–so I downloaded and installed the public beta of the much-delayed and rescoped “Longhorn,” the operating system that Microsoft is now calling Windows Vista.
I’ve also installed the public betas of […]

Jakob Nielsen (guru of all things web-usability-related) did a salary study, and here’s what he found (as reported by ZDNet.com):
1. Entry-level staffers were paid unrealistically high salaries during the bubble, when dot-com companies were desperate to hire any warm body that walked in the door
2. Experienced staffers were also paid more during the bubble, but […]

Tarus Balog of the OpenNMS Group is a little exercised, and justifiably so, about a new crop of firms that see “open source” as nothing more than a marketing buzzword:
Open source software development is not just about providing the source code for your application. It is much more about building a community around a shared […]

Problems with the balance between the demands of profit-driven corporations and peoples’ need to live a satisfying life won’t be cured by policy statements and procedure manuals. That isn’t where the causes lie. They’re inside peoples’ heads: obsessive achievement drive, ambition gone mad, laughable greed for money and power, and blithe disregard of anything not […]

Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?
So you want to be a consultant…?