I just spent the last few hours with my eyes glued to a collection of essays/articles about software development written by an ex-Amazon.com employee.
Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants
It's a most excellent collection of articles ranging from language design, to recruiting, to programmer productivity. He also talks quite a bit about "average programmers", along the same lines as what I talked about the other day. There's close to 50 articles, each quite lengthy. I'll probably be reading these again tomorrow.
Also, at lunch with Kevin today I was reminded of another article concerning software development which made me laugh this week. Christopher Hawkins wrote a hillarious blog entry about scheduling software projects...
Why Your Schedule Is No Good - And How To Fix It
A great example, and the recurring theme from the article...
So, if you're planning a 6-month project, plan for each developer to be out for a week during that period.
"But, nobody ever takes vacations at my company" you protest. Do you know why nobody ever takes vacations at your company? Because nobody schedules projects correctly, and when Joe Developer wants to take a vacation, his boss says "No, we can't afford to have you out right now, you can take your vacation when the project is over". But then there's another screwed-up, mis-scheduled project going on that really needs Joe's help, so he gets assigned to that project with the promise that he'll be allowed to take a vacation when it's over. Lather, rinse, repeat.