Contra Authoritarian Contribution Rules

This article contains technical meta-guidance based on my personal experience. I haven’t seen scholarly research for or against this guidance, but I would expect it to move in the same direction. This guidance is meant to be leveraged in general as a default best practice, but there may be times where exceptions are justified. The … Read more

A Low Quality Forecast on Flying Car Prices

This article forecasts the price of flying transportation over time by arguing that flying transportation is revolutionary transportation, and Tesla was also revolutionary transportation, therefore we can estimate the dynamic price trend of flying transportation by looking at how Tesla did over time. Today I read that a French inventor had flown on a hover … Read more

Accurately Time-Estimating Development Tasks

While I admit that logging tasks in Agile results in some overhead, there are many cases where this overhead is worth it. Decomposing user stories into tasks or subtasks in JIRA is a non-special case of task decomposition in general. Here’s an example paper showing that decomposition reduces estimation error. The magnitude is far from … Read more

Path to a Software Development Career

I recently sent an email to a person who was interested in becoming a software developer. This person had yet to graduate high school and was considering getting a GED. Whether you are in a similar educational situation or not, I think the below provides some good guidance to people wanting to get started in … Read more