Tech Notes From The Trenches

“It’s just a web page. ”

“It’s just a text box.”

“It’s just an email notification.”

I have heard and read so many of these. “It’s just a… ” you name it!

This usually comes from someone who wants you to be 10 times more optimistic about the task at hand than you would be. Programmers are inherently optimistic. So there is no need for more optimism.

We, as software engineers, need to explain to clients why it’s not “just a web page” or “a text box” or an “email notification.” For example, web pages need to be cross-browser compatible (ie. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and now.. Chrome on both Mac and Windows)

There are a lot of aspects that we consider and clients don’t. That’s why they pay us to do it. It’s always positive to explain these aspects when presenting an estimate.

Always be realistic about your estimate. Don’t let the “It’s just a…” influence your estimate. Follow a process. Separate the task in sub-tasks. Estimate effort for each sub-task. Add up your estimate.

And most importantly, support your estimate with your expertise. You will always get the “12 hours?!? I thought it would take 2 hours.” from a client or boss. Stand behind your estimate and defend it with facts and your expertise.

I expect programmers to be perfectionists but also pragmatic. I expect them to love Chess, Go or any other strategic game. I expect them to be nerds. I expect them to love to build cool things.

I expect project managers to be well versed in software engineering, project management and motivation. I expect them to have some technical knowledge. I expect them to be people persons.

I expect technical team leaders to be programmers with strong communication skills. I expect them to coach other programmers and encourage them to write great code. I expect team leaders to always look for the best answer to hard questions.

I expect my team members to be respectful of other team members’ time. I expect anyone in the team to interrupt me, only when they really need my help. (Because interruptions kill productivity)

That’s what I expect from my team to build great software.

The other day I released the Whuffiebank gem. It is a library that implements the Whuffiebank API in Ruby.

Even though I have tested it and written tests to go with it, I haven’t used it yet. I plan to implement it on Hopsy, but I haven’t had time yet.

I am not a hardcore user of the Whuffiebank, meaning that I haven’t given any whuffies yet and no one has ever given me any whuffies. I have yet to contribute to the Whuffie economy.

But I like the idea of Twitter handles having a certain monthly ‘karma number‘. That’s why I built this open source gem. Hopefully it will be useful for many developers.

At Hopsy, I have used it to rank tweets. I have built a simple formula that takes the Topsy influence and the Whuffiebank reputation and returns a number.

The higher the number, the more important the result. Simple. That’s my attempt to reduce the ‘Twitter noise‘ out there. I know there is still a long way to go.