Mr Leong 梁先生

Taken from Seth Godin’s blog post.

The job of the smart business person isn’t to fish in waters where coders are cheap. It’s to have enough initiative and vision that the best coders in the world will realize that they’ll do better with you than without you.

Business people add value when they make things happen, not when they seek to hire cheap.

Students are graduating in May, I have been interviewing many fresh grad for the past few weeks. Usually the master students have some working experience but bachelor students do not.

When I am evaluating a candidate, I mainly look for passion in software development, experience/knowledge is secondary, I do not care much about the academic result. Being good academically does not make you a good software developer. After all, most of the subjects learned in school are not applicable in our daily work.

I do not want people whom are just looking for a job. Passionate developers enjoy what they are doing. They will have desire to do the best and constantly improve their skills without being told to do so. Saying things like “I am keen in learning new technology”, “I am passionate in programming”, “I love software development” does not differentiate you from 90% of the other candidates. These are just can answers to my questions. Don’t say it, show it! If you have not even download the Android SDK and run the Hello World app, please don’t say “I have a strong interested in Android.”

If a person is passionate about guitar, he/she will frequently play guitar during spare time, even if this is not required by school coursework. That is why I like to ask “Have you ever developed any application that is not required by your school/work?” during interview.

Stream Media is looking for passionate developers! If you are one, you may send me an resume .

[The post was initially posted on MoVend Blog]

As a developer, I have to make multiple decisions everyday. When making a trade-off, there hardly is any right or wrong. Over time, the team develops core values, which act as guidelines for decision making. These guidelines then help the team members to make consistent decisions, allowing us to work effectively as a whole.

“How can I prevent, or make it difficult for a user to make a mistake?” This is one of the many questions I ask myself whenever I am designing an interface (UI and API). I use it as a guideline for making decisions. In order to achieve an objective (e.g. make a payment), the user has to perform a series of actions through interaction with the UI. When a user makes a mistake, he/she may be frustrated because the objective is not achieved. One method of circumventing this problem is to limit to only 1 possible way of performing a task. When there is only 1 possible way to perform a task, you can easily design a UI that guides user’s interaction. By reducing the possibility of making a mistake, user achieves the objective easily and fuss-free, coding then becomes easier as user action validation is simpler.

Limiting ways of performing a task is just one of the various implementation of preventing users from making mistakes. So then, how do you make it difficult for a user to make a mistake? Feel free to share your experience in the comments section.

I discovered Gravity in Google Chrome Web Store. It is a simple and elegant project management software for Agile team.

Projects

User can create up to 3 projects. At time of writing, Gravity is finalizing the paid subscription packages. User can sign up with Google / Google App account. After creating a new project, participants can be invited to join the project. Each participant can be classified in one of the following roles: Spectator, Participant, Manager.

Stories

Stories can be created and assigned to participants. Multiple stories can be grouped into user defined categories (e.g. Web, API, Mobile client). Multiple acceptance tests can be created for each story. Each acceptance test can be marked as “Passes” or “Fails”. Multiple tasks can be added to a story. It is presented as a checklist, where user can check the checkbox to mark the task as completed.

Iterations

User can define iterations. By default, each iteration last for 2 weeks. Each iteration has a cost value, which is the total cost of stories assigned to this iteration. Each story will be assigned a cost value (default 3). Stories can be either schedule in the backlog (unscheduled), or one of the iterations.

Kaban

Gravity has a Kanban feature called Task Board. It has 4 stages: To Do, In Process, To Verify, Done. Tasks within each story will appear on the Kanban board. Each task can be dragged across the Kanban board by using a mouse. I think this is a wonderful feature. Kanban is a useful tool for team to review and optimize its process.

Reports

Various information (i.e. story cost, stories burn down, task burn down) are presented in the form of charts. This feature give user a visual summary of the performance of the team.

Issue/Bug Tracker

Besides the story/task management, Gravity also comes with a simple issue tracker. Each issue has 4 attributes: title, description, category, severity.  To facilitate searching of issues, it has a filter feature where user can filter the issues by a combination of different criteria.

Opinion

Gravity is very simple to use. It uses AJAX to make user interaction smooth. It is suitable for Scrum/Kanban team. Gravity offers more features than Pivotal Tracker. If you like Pivotal Tracker and want an integrated Kanban/Issue tracker, you can consider Gravity.

Linux kernel is capable of recognizing many Android devices connected through USB. You can make the device available in userspace through udev. In order to do that, I need to write some udev rules.  I use lsusb to find the vendor ID needed to write udev rules. This is my udev rule (/etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules):

# Nexus One
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1",SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1",SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"

# HTC
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",SYMLINK+="android_adb"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",SYMLINK+="android_fastboot"