Coding Horror on coding quantity vs. quality.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories. […]
- Stop theorizing.
- Write lots of software.
- Learn from your mistakes.
From this you can plainly see that the rise of iterative/agile development methodologies is a natural evolution; improvements only come from practice and learning from your mistakes.
It puts me in mind of something my company’s IT Director recently said: “If you got past the interview stage, you’ll never make a stupid mistake in this office. You’ll make mistakes—granted—but you’ll learn from them, and grow stronger.”
Primarily an advert for a new “community search tool” (the author’s custom Google search), this blog post turns into an impressive list of the top productivity and personal development blogs in the following categories:
Previously: Top 50 Productivity Blogs
The back-to-paper trend is gaining momentum, and Bill Westerman recently joined the movement; Getting Sh-t Done is his beautifully described analog productivity method.
An example of his system can seen on flickr.
Last week I moved house. During the move I took stock of my belongings in my ongoing battle with clutter and discovered that more than half of my boxes contained books… and that’s after I gave a box or two of books to a good home a month before!
The emotional attachement that is made with a good book is strong, and it is this that is causing me to hoard them. Advice for clearing literary clutter, an Ask MetaFilter thread, may be the starting point of a new purge.
De-cluttering involves recognizing that regret is part of life, and being OK with that. Yes, I’ve given away books that I now often wish I still owned. But I’ve also screwed up relationships, made iffy career choices, etc. — you suck it up and move on. If you try to cling to every single thing (material, spiritual, or emotional) that you might need one day in the totally hypothetical future, you’re going to end up bogged down in a lot of stuff.
via 43 Folders
The Top 50 Productivity Blogs is one of those lists that I love to hate. It’s so useful and contains a wealth of extraordinary resources, but at the same time will temporarily ruin my productivity as I scour through the archives of the mentioned blogs looking for said resources.