Archive for the ‘Web development’ Category

Joel Spolsky wrote an article and again I feel like he is right all the way: web standards are a means to an end, not the end goal, sigh.

They (as in your wife) don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
Martian Headsets | Joel Spolsky

And besides he has a point, he is also a very funny writer:

FireQx 3.0 treats snow as rain, because you need windshield wipers in the snow, Qxyzrhjjjjukltk 5.0 does not, because the programmer who worked on that feature lives in a warm part of Mars without snow and doesn’t have a driver’s license anyway. Yes, they have driver’s licenses on Mars.Martian Headsets | Joel Spolsky

If the last quote doesn’t make any sense to you, go and read the article: Martian Headsets by Joel Spolsky.

I recently bought 2 books on project management (PM), a thin and concise one, and a large volume with all the bells and whistles that come with project management.

The last one didn’t arrive yet, but the one that was delivered was “The One Page Project Manager” (OPPM). You can read it in 2 hours: it’s short, to the point, and it seems to work for me.

The book is not a study about Project Management but a story about a project manager that came up with a great format (spreadsheet) for communicating project status to anyone who is involved or just want to know what is going on with the project. The author is not focusing on planning, it’s about communication, making sure people are involved and helping these people getting things done, on time.

The excel sheet, because that’s what it’s all about, is structured around 5 main areas: how / objectives / timeline / cost / owners. The tasks are each connected to an objective. That way, objectives are done when all takss in that row are finished, simple and effective

The sheets really give a good overview of the how (tasks), the objectives (goals, what to achieve?) and on who owns the tasks, something I think is crucial. Less attention is given to the timeline, and the cost which is measurable and therefore better communicated in a different way. The timeline is still there, but the focus is on getting closer to the objective of the project.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Well, the book is great and so are the excel sheets. Unfortunatly I am not using the excel sheets, because it is a generic approach, it works for every project, true, but not for every manager.
Some people need different info, and that is why I am not using the sheets at the moment, though I am connecting the 3 areas (how, objectives, owners) to make sure everyone knows what need to be done, when and why.

Prefix your numeric id’s (int) with a letter if you plan to use them as html id attributes, because you should.
ID’s are not supposed to start with a number.

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens (“-”), underscores (“_”), colons (“:”), and periods (“.”).

W3 HTML 4.01 Specs