bill breen

director of web development @ smartmoney.com
writer/founder of www.effectivedevelopment.net

billb@effectivedevelopment.net

After working in the web industry for 10+ years, and having managed a development group for over 5 years, I have decided to put some of my knowledge, and practical views into writing. I really believe in a pragmatic approach to web development. Managing a group of programmers in a practical, agile manner, gets projects completed, and keeps teams ready for the next project to come across their plate.

I know it is cliche, but I have a truly pragmatic approach to life, which flows into my general philosophy of work and software development. Not everything comes down to specs, documentation, and methodologies. In fact, the end result is what matters, hence being ‘effective’. In the end, effective development accomplishes goals, and gets projects out the door.

Taken from one of my earlier posts entitled transparent background

Let me give you a little information about where I am coming from. I would like to show you that you can merge modern development techniques such as getting real, agile development, pragmatic programming in a corporate environment. Currently I am the Director of Web Development for a large financial website. We publish original content, as well as magazine content. We also offer a full suite of market and personal finance research tools. I have a lean tech team of 7 developers (5 web developers and 2 DBAs). The average tenure on my team is 8 years which is rare in this field. Even rarer is how we kept much of our talent during the dot com boom and the years of recruiter phone calls with free Knicks tickets. Not only has the economic climate changed even Knicks tickets, as a perk, are worthless these days.
We have managed to stay lean and put out a great product for years. I have always incorporated a practical style of programming and development with my team, combined with the reality of corporate America. I have named this style “effective development”. We have been developing this way for years now, even before these techniques had a name or following. It is not a pie in the sky style, rather it combines technology ideals with business realities to allow teams to deliver good product. While I think some of the newer ideals are great, and worth reading/following, I hope to show you some real life applications of these styles, and what has worked for us here. Because in the end, you are judged by the product you put out, and not the process used to get to the final product….