Benton Barnett

The Daily WTF posted a great anecdote that illustrates the need for clear communication between clients and contractors and why contractors shouldn’t be afraid to ask ‘why.’

“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed.

“No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”

Bud Caddell compares chess and business. He points out the value of discovering and experimenting with new strategies as a way to remain relevant not only in your market but also in your job.

Just as in chess, there’s no optimal strategy for navigating a market – your best course of action is to make predictions, collect insights, and explore successful strategies outside of your company and bring them in.

This list of Ingredients for a Good Online Comment works well for any kind of online communication.

1. A dash of brevity. Nobody wants to read through pages of verbiage. Blog posts are meant to be short, and comments are meant to be shorter. When I see a really long comment, I wonder if the writer isn’t a little overly devoted to his or her idea and how their time is being allocated.
2. A heaping tablespoon of clear and grammatical expression. Okay, I'm a professor, but when I see spelling and grammatical mistakes — even online — I discount the rest of the message. This is not entirely fair to non-native speakers of English, so I sometimes discount this factor a bit for exotic-sounding names.

Matt Gemmell posted a brilliant article about developing iPad apps and how to correctly us their built in UI elements. A lot of what he says rings true for a lot of user interface design, especially in the desktop world.

Feature-creep or bloat is the bane of desktop software. Any application with a non-trivial feature set isn’t fully used by most of its users; that’s pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop or even the iWork apps on the Mac. There are plenty of features there which you’ll never touch, and would probably never miss if they were gone.

Most users need only a small set of features, and software is better when it’s focused. A nice side-effect of focused software is that the UI is easier to design and comprehend (because there’s less of it, and it’s more obvious why each thing is there). The trick is to figure out which small set of features are actually important, and implement only those.

There is a lot of wisdom in the article, certainly worth your time if you work in, around or near software development.