Productivity

Reg Braithwraite wrote a bit of food for thought on productivity.

I think when people talk about productivity, they often set "high productivity" as goal to be achieved, when really, we can only measure the state of completion of individual tasks. Wrote a test unit. Check. Implemented form validation logic. Check. Designed wireframe. Check. Achieved high productivity. Huh? What does that even mean?

Notice how, despite being very measurable and sometimes even paramount to get a project out of the door, none of the tasks I mentioned can really be measurements of productivity:

• Write a test unit. Pretty important in TDD. Not what you should be working on when you're putting up a prototype demo that will be used in a sales presentation that you've just been informed will start in 2 hours.
• Implemented form validation. Anyone knows it's important, but rolling your own when the framework has a built-in function to handle the exact same case is sometimes a waste of time. The opposite can be true too: you might find that using a framework built-in helper to save 2 minutes wasn't worth the 2 hours you end up spending on it when the qa phase comes along and a bunch of cases are broken.

Etc. Etc.

If I don't know what your goals are, and you don't know mine and we have no idea what each other's teams can and can't do (because of knowledge levels, corporate constraints, programming languages, frameworks, workflows, whatever), how can we intelligently discuss productivity improvements? It strikes me as odd that people would go as far as preach a methodology or even a coding practice as "the one", when I think about it from this angle.

Besides, hasn't there been enough articles around the tubes saying how rewarding programmers based on their individual "performance" is a bad idea?

Why do we even talk about productivity?

Doomed

Doomed. Doomed. Doomed.

What's up with people and this obsession with doom?

How not to sort by ratings

Informative. Goes to show how good knowing statistics can be.

When can I use...

A list of upcoming standards and drafts and their level of implementation in various versions of major browsers.

My conclusion: use flash :)

Why you should be a good citizen online

Nice article talking about legal standards myths and how police can disrupt your life in case you get accused of doing something illegal online.

Look ma, I'm a prophet

I've been seeing a lot of jabs at how the newspaper industry should restructure now that they're reportedly not doing so great.

I keep wondering if these people actually run businesses on the models they are proposing or if they're just prophets full of themselves.

Cognitive bias on wikipedia

Cognitive bias. via. I know I'll forget the term Dunning-Kruger, so here it is for future reference.

Carakan

Opera really does not sleep on the job. I wish it'd get more traction, I think it's a great browser.

Users don't always know what they want

Speed is more important than quantity, despite users' reasoning that more results are better, according to Marissa Meyer from Google.

Why debating CSS vs Tables is pointless

So some were recently saying CSS *should not* be used for layouts and others were saying CSS *should* be used for layout.

On one end, there are people who really have better things to do than spending the day typing up angled brackets and curly braces. Great for them. Whip up a quick layout in 10 minutes and you're on your way. Requirements? What requirements?

On the other end, there are people who need to maintain sites and people who have technically challenging requirements (you know, the print versions of the pages must look a certain way, layouts look and feel are to be revised and approved by the client, etc). Great, CSS to the rescue. Money pays the bills, life is nice. Brownie points if you improved yourself by learning something new about CSS on your journey to "front-end expertise".

Most people are usually somewhere in between the two extremes and their whereabouts in the gray area also depends on things like whether it's a job or a hobby project, or whether it's monday or friday-when-omg-we-need-to-get-this-thing-out-of-the-door-now. Or whether their boss is a technical evangelist or a sales person. Or whether they're lazy. Or stressed out. Or whatever. Whether kittens are blue.

The obvious but often forgotten thing about the teh intahblagz is that we don't know who's at the other end of the wire, let alone what their environment, priorities and workflow look like. So we read all of these "advices" about why this is the bomb and why that is THE way to do whatever, and in the end, we just do whatever happens to look like the best idea at the moment. Mind fap. </acid>