"Why are you always in such a hurry, Mr Lipwig?"
Mr Lipwig, chairman of Ankh-Morpork bank, was asked the question when he wanted the paper-money-printing-machines to replace the gold-coin-making-machines in the shortest time possible. Hire more golems, give bonus, do anything possible.
And his answer to the question is:
Because people don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.
Do things in a hurry, and it could turn out better for everyone.
"I just need to have this simple feature implemented, which I know you can code in a (couple) of lines! So please charge me no more than $2, or 2 minutes of work."
This must sound familiar to developers, in some way.
I was reading a story of what a carpenter said to his client in a blog post The Price of Experience and Expertise.
There is a man who has a squeak on his home staircase. Every day he comes home, his wife takes the opportunity to remind him that he said he would fix it. Running out of time, he hires a carpenter just to get it done and finally bring some quiet to his household.
The carpenter arrives, walks up then down the stairs, takes out his hammer, and quickly hammers in a nail to quiet the noise. He then hands his bill to the man who promptly looks at it and says “$60???, all you did was hammer in a nail! I could have done that myself.” Then as he looks closer, the bill says “hammer in a nail – $2, knowing where to put the nail – $58.
It is the same for programming. Typing the code - $2. Knowing where to type - $98 (:
Developers love to develop, hate to test, though testing is more critical than everything. Ok maybe not everything. But when bugs happen, it runs hell.
Testing is a never-will-finish process and it is impossible to test every scenario. In a project where resources for full scale testing are limited, and developers themselves needs to be the testers, a shorter and more concise testing process is needed.
Minimal Testing Process is such a process. It is categorized into 4 parts that addresses:
Any test cases that are neither new, frequently used, critical nor complex are dropped. Simple.
There is now an iPhone app that keeps the heartache away.. Get the free ad-supported version or a paid $0.99 version
Really nice flowers~
Send to your friends and love ones a flower such as this
Its time for salary comparison!
With reference from Developer Salary Levels, 2004-2009, here are some quick numbers (for 2009, in US dollars) :
It seems that been a developer has some good pay. Even an Object Visual Programmer (that is object-oriented programming in Visual Basic) taking the lowest among is still quite good!
If you are baffled by the developers' titles, here are some interesting comments..
Programmers get work done and provide businesses value.
Software Engineers and Architects talk about how the programmers get work done and provide business value. ;)
Programmers tend to think of programming as an "ART" and as such can accept releasing code with large numbers of known bugs and problems.
(Like UBUNTU shipping with 25,000 known bugs and problems).
Software Engineer (or Systems Engineer) treats programming as it should be and as an engineering discipline. They are the professional programmers.
