2008 - Lessons Learned

14 JAN No tags No Comments

 

 

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!

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