A few weeks ago I wrote that good design is a dying but important art. While I do believe that is true, there is also too much of a good thing. Sometimes you can get too caught up in the ‘ideal’, worrying and designing things to be perfect. Deciding what is the right blend of [...]

Simply put, deploying code on a set schedule is not practical or effective. Unless you are a bank or medical facility, you just do not have to adhere to such a strict release and deployment schedule. I have had the luxury of working on sites where we do not employ deployment schedules. There are times [...]

We use BaseCamp here for managing projects. It is extremely popular, so I am not going to go into a detailed tutorial of its benefits. It has really made keeping track of projects and their status a breeze. We even use the API to run custom reports that fit our needs. When first proposed, I [...]

Sometimes its hard to effectively share everything among all members of a group.  We have weekly meetings to review our projects and their status and we use project collaboration software but sometimes we simply get absorbed in our own projects and workload. A great way to share information among team members is through fixing error [...]

Keep an environment where developers, and all employees for that matter are allowed to make mistakes.  If people are afraid of repurcussions, then they will spend more time trying to hide or make excuses for an issue rather than fixing that issue.  If something is going drastically wrong on our website, I much rather we [...]

Developing effectively starts with the team. Of course projects requirements, deadlines and specs all play their part, but if you do not have an effective team for the job, you will go nowhere fast. In web development teams should be kept lean. If you have a large team, consider breaking them up into groups of [...]