Re you’re point on planning. You may not be aware of it, but that particular quote from Eisenhower is widely used by agile developers to make exactly your point: that planning is more valuable than following a plan.

You appear to in violent agreement with agile developers.

This confuses me. No one who has actively participated in an agile project would make a mistake like that. Have you actually ever worked on an agile software development project? Does that affect your ability to accurately judge the effectiveness of agile methods?

Regardless, good article.

I have been reading your blog from some time now and I really enjoy it. In one of your posts you gave very valuable advice about how to become a better software engineer. That post was about ‘How to get a job at Realtime Worlds’, and in that you gave some tips in the end. Recently I applied for the position of Graduate Software Engineer at RTW, and you took my telephonic interview, and I also got to the stage of face-to-face interview but couldn’t clear it. When I was told that you will be taking my telephonic interview I found your web blog on WordPress, and from then I made a habit of reading software related blogs.

I just finished my MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Glasgow, and it was a great learning experience. I believe that one of the biggest benefits I got from my MSc is that now I feel myself on the right track. I got to know about people such as Joel Spolsky and his blog, Jeff Atwood and his blog ‘codinghorror’. I think that every aspiring software engineer should read these blogs to get good advices, and inspirations. The first person that I took inspiration from in the world of game programming was ‘John Carmack’, of ID Software. Therefore I set out to work on a small 3D game in my Final Year Project of BSc, and I am very proud of that project. This is because many beginners in game developers give up at a certain point because either they are not given the right guidance or they start assuming that they will have to implement all the engine features/routines by themselves. They find themselves reinventing the wheel. There was a time when I was searching for free or opensource game engines, such as Ogre, and crystal space, but I found myself in the same situation, because Ogre is just a wrapper for opengl and directx libraries. So one would have to first develop tools for world building, hidden surface removals, collision detection, particle systems, physics etc to start working on a game. However if one starts to work on these engines and accomplishes some substantial work, then his understanding will enhance greatly. On the other hand Torque Game Engine allows a beginner to kick start in game development by using its tools (world editor, GUI editor, Particle Effects etc), and a C++ like scripting language called Torque Script. But I believe that just using a scripting language does not give you enough control of the game. To get full control, one has to program in C++. It depends upon the engine as well obviously. Is it so that when you are using an engine such as Unreal Engine for APB, all the game code is written in the scripting language? What is C++ used for then?

My MSc project was about developing a simulation for the Scrum Software Development process. Working on this project build my interest about based project management tools. This project does not simulates the manual tasks of Scrum such as meetings, but it allows its users to manage Projects, Product Backlogs, and Sprint Backlogs.

Recently I read a book called ‘The Big Switch’ from Nicholas Carr. It is a very thought provoking book about Cloud Computing, and it gave me a feeling that web based project management tools are also a part of cloud computing.

Thank you and kind regards,

Ismail

As for the icons, I need better ones … it’s embarrassing to admit, but the “moon” is actually supposed to be a banana, which is supposed to be about doing something healthy!! Anyhow, doesn’t matter too much as long as I know what they are

I feel like I walked into the middle of Magic the Gathering tournament. He is speaking some alien language. I guess you need to go back a bit for context?

Is one of your stickies a self-portrait? I’m trying to guess what your “trickles” might be:

Stick-figure: talk to somebody? have a one-to-one meeting? jump up and down? something “Luke-related”?
Gun: play the game?
Hex: write some code?
Radiating arrows: talk to groups of people/many people?
Pentagram: something to do with geometry? favourites?
Moon: get home before dark?

To explain “positive” versus “negative” reasons a bit more, imagine this: suppose you had 3 pieces of evidence about a candidate. 1 was “average”, 1 was good, and 1 was bad. Would you hire them? The “positive” approach says “look, they did something good, we should hire them because they’ll be capable of doing good things for us”. The “negative” approach says “they did something bad, we should not hire them”.

I’ve seen people use both approaches to hiring. People with the former approach tend to make a special effort to look for positive reasons. That means spending extra time on a candidate to find things unique about the candidate that are good. People with the latter approach create some standard tests and reject candidates who fail them.

My point is that while the former approach seems more human, more personal, and perhaps better in an ideal world, it’s just not practical, because hiring is often not about how to make the perfect evaluation of a single individual, but about the most efficient way to process a group of applicants. The “positive” approach may be better to use in the later stages of interviewing, when you have fewer candidates to consider.

The use of the “simpliest instrument” involves the problem of partiality. What you get is only a part of the picture, the part you are interested in, but the problem is that it is not independent from the rest of the factors involved in the final performance “on the place”.

Usually, massive selection is made upon a profile wich is used to estimate the optimum or desirable parameters. After that the objective parameters of all applicants are gathered, and the closest to the desirable base line is then selected for retest with an inependent instrument. Cheap, precise and fast, but also serves to minimize the probability of loosing the selected applicant in the future by establishing this factor in the base line.

Anyway, a very interesting approach of yours.