I’ve seen a lot of blog posts lately detailing the authors thoughts on the previous year. As a beginning blogger, it can’t hurt to take a tip from those more experienced than I… A lot happened in 2008, but I’ll focus on my lessons learned:
- If you tackle tough problems, the payoff (and the risk) is big
- When interviewing someone for a position, you can usually tell within 5 minutes if you’ll hire them
- I am not a Systems Engineer…
- No matter how much you read about it, Unit Testing has to be done (over and over) to be learned
- It’s really hard to learn an application consisting of 2 million+ lines of code, no matter how well it’s written
- …if it’s not written well, there tends to be a lot of bugs
- Extreme pressure to fix a bug is no fun, but it makes actually fixing it that much more satisfying
- No matter how hard the bug, if you keep pushing, you will eventually figure it out.
- Stop trying to find a billing and accounting tool better than Freshbooks.com, it doesn’t exist
- Build in a regular payment schedule based on Milestones in a proposal - DO NOT do a payment at the beginning and the end
- Commit changes to Subversion at the end of everyday - that way if you’re computer crashes, you don’t have to worry about losing a week’s worth of work while you wait 2 weeks for a new motherboard to be shipped so that you can fix your computer
- Apparently, I have been the owner of 4 defective motherboards, consecutively…
- Building your own computer is cheaper, and fun… but sometimes it sucks… (see above)
- Windows XP, not Vista… or maybe it was the computer (see above)
- Buy the book: Getting Things Done, read it, implement it - and install the “GTDInbox” add-on for Gmail and Firefox
- Re-organize your garage - it’s liberating!
