With every Happy New Year comes the realization that I am going to be another year older on the 2nd of every January. 
Regardless of what all my friends seem to think about my 28 years of experience and I am very excited about the next year. I have got a lot of personal and professional goals that I have set for myself. Many people are going into 2009 apprehensive about the state of their job but for some reason I have got a very upbeat attitude about the entire thing.
I am learning to live in the present here and now. Here’s to a great year for all of us.
Here’s a tip for all those who want to siphon a little bit of that right-brain energy: At the top of every morning (preferably while you are still in bed), grab some paper and write. Just write. Whatever comes to mind. Three pages worth. The idea is that your right brain way of thinking will still be somewhat functional because the left-brain has not shifted into high gear just yet. Who knows? You may just get your next great idea before breakfast!!
One of the most important responsibilities that any project manager has to undertake is to track and keep on top of the status of each project. That is part of the job. If you are working on a project that involves multiple teams, make it a priority to know where everyone is on their tasks. Do it in a way that doesn’t continually interrupt their train of thought.
One way of keeping track of tasks is to display the progress of each task (hours remaining till task is complete) in a location that everyone involved in the project has easy access to them. This could be anything from a poster sheet to a whiteboard or even a persistent online message board - as long as it is big enough and persistent to contain all the important tasks that require tracking. Also, make sure that each member of the team understands the purpose behind these information broadcasting tools and encourage them to update it on a regular basis. A good time to update the whiteboard may be every time code is checked in to your source management system(svn / cvs / git).
In the long run if the boards are respected and honored for their purpose both the project management and development teams can spend less time on “figuring out where we are” and more time trying to figure out the next steps to take towards a successful launch date.
Throughout my career working in the web development industry, one of the most interesting aspects is the dynamic between the project manager and the development team members.
Developers can tell when they have a good project manager on board with them . They look forward to the chance of working with them. You are:
- comfortable and conversant with technology. Ideally you ought to have some technical experience behind you.
- you exercise courage and patience when interfacing with the business and technical personnel. You can handle whiny programmers, unrelenting clients, and the crushing weight of looming deadlines and you make it look easy.
- you are constantly looking for and communicating solutions to decrease the burden of the programming team. We understand that you’re not on the same level as the dev team technically. Get involved anyway. You’ll only sound stupid the first few times but you may be able to catch a glimpse of how hard the problem truly is. This also takes a bit of courage.
- you act as a buffer for the development team. Great project managers are resilient and don’t fold under pressure.
Continue reading ‘The difference between good and bad project managers’
It has taken several months of work on my Macbook Pro to realize that TextMate is my favorite text editor!
Here are some ways that you can use Textmate to help you with web development. Please note that all of these tips (and more) can be found in the most excellent book, Pragmatic TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac
Closing opening tags - One really important command in this bundle to open and close a tag. You can open and close a tag by typing ^+Shift+< when there is nothing to the left of your cursor. You will see a open tag and close tag appear. Type in whatever you want for your open tag and watch the close tag automatically mirror it for you. After you are done typing in the tag hit Tab and you’ll be able to place your cursor in between the open and close tag. This is great when creating pages full of HTML code. This works with XML documents as well.
Inserting a doctype - For anybody who cannot remember the syntax differences between the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype element, type in the word doctype and hit Tab. This will bring up an option menu from where you can select the exact doctype that you want. It’s saved me an extra 30 seconds. Maybe it will for you too.
Validating your markup with the W3C - Every web developer is concerned with web standards. It helps ensure that all of their web pages work across multiple platforms and stays well formed so that it does not break tomorrow either. Now you can do this within Textmate by typing in ^+Shift+V.
Inserting color codes in CSS stylesheets - When you are creating your CSS stylesheets and you want to double-check the color of a particular hex value, type in Shift+Cmd+C. This will bring up Textmate’s color chooser and allow you make a choice. The color you selected will be transformed to a six digit hexadecimal value with a leading number sign.
When you start using these Textmate shortcuts to do your web development work, you are going to notice that your time to turn around web projects are going to be shorter. Combined with shortcuts, snippets, and command-line integration into Textmate, you are going to start wondering if you ever need to use any other tool for creating textual content.
Last year a co-worker at my last job mentioned a really good book that I should pick up called the The One Minute Manager
. I finally got a chance to read it this weekend and I enjoyed it. A very short read ( ten hours tops ) and presented it in a very comfortable tone, this book teaches you about how to become a more effective manager. While not everyone has been blessed ( cursed? ) with such a position, this book might mean different things to different people. From a technical perspective, it really means being transparent to my team members when it comes time to managing software development.
Here are the key points found in the One Minute Manager:
- Agree/commit to some goals. Then write them down somewhere so you can look at them daily. Figure out how your behavior is helping or hurting you from reaching the goals you set for yourself.
- Catch someone doing something right! Openly praise them for it and encourage them.
- If someone is capable of doing something but their performance is lacking, make sure you are specific in letting that person know what is wrong and how you feel about it immediately. Do not attack their character - just their behavior.
In the workplace, it is becoming rare that you find a good person that will be honest and forthcoming with your progress as well as your peers. Practicing the lessons found in The One Minute Manager can go a long way in making sure that you will be an individual that other people can count on.
I love the K2 wordpress theme. I swear I will not hack themes from now on… atleast until I absolutely need to.
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