Great Post on Motivation & Development Tips

Two beautiful learnings from the post...

• "If you miss the train, don’t chase it. Catch the next one. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it."
• " Don’t keep missing the same trains. Set up your own train stations for results. For example, I set up a rhythm of daily, weekly, and monthly results. When I lose the day, I make the most of the next one. "

Handling Inconvenient Requests
Mange Your DBA Career, Don’t Let it Manage You
How to Hone Your DBA Skill Set
How to Identify Important Characteristics for a DBA Job Candidate
Some thoughts on interviewing….

Excerpts from great posts

“Craig’s List” of top ten leadership tips should be required reading for anyone in business:

Key Learnings

• Present your game plan in a way that players get confident that your ideas are solid.
• Instill in your team a belief in success
• Don’t expect players to perform beyond their capability.
• Be patient with players’ shortcomings

What do managers do and how big should my team be?

• Know the code
• Help you to know what you need to do
• Determine the tasks to be completed by the team and balance the work across the team
• Assist in skills development
• Communication to/from the feature team about the feature team
• Performance evaluation
• Hiring the team

Tips to be a successful Test-DEV-PM

1. Be passionate about software
2. Know the concepts behind computers, and understand how those are reflected in a specific system
3. Understand what drives you and where in the triad you think your personality and character puts you

Learning as an engineer -- rising from the ashes of failed projects
The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer
My Todo list – the most powerful weapon in my productivity arsenal
Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas
Sharpening Your Skills: Managing Teams
12 Practices to be a Better Developer

• Source Control - If you don’t store your code in source control, you’re putting your company at risk.
• Test-Driven Development produces higher-quality code. Behavior Driven Design - Behavior is documentation for other developers and users.
• Build Systems - Building is more than just compiling code.
• Continuous Integration - Check in early and often.
• Real Time Code Review - Two heads are better than one.
• Refactoring: Easy as red light green light.
• Read Code - "You don’t become a better writer by just writing." Scott Hanselman
• Code In Increments - Real programmers work for hours and hours straight, without a break, without even looking up. Don’t break your flow to stop and compile: just keep typing! :)
• Sharpen your skills by learning a new language.
• Learn SOLID
• Single Responsibility Principle - There should never be more than one reason for a class to change.
• Open Closed Principle - A class should be open
for extension but closed for modification.
• Liscov Substitution Principle - Subtypes must be substitutable for their base types.
• Interface Segregation Principle - Clients should not be forced to depend upon interfaces that they do not use.
• Dependency Inversion Principle - High level modules should not depend upon low level modules. Both should depend upon abstractions. Abstractions should not depend upon details. Details should depend upon abstractions.
• Know when to unlearn. The ways you learned when you first started are clearly the best ways. Not much has changed since then, really. :)
• Be a Mentor

The Impact of Staffing Practices on Software Quality and Productivity
100 Helpful Tips for Great Managers
12 Things Good Bosses Believe
Scott Belsky: Creativity x Organization = Impact
Creativity x Organization = Impact
How to lose friends and alienate people: The joys of engineering leadership
Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences
 Institutionalized!
The unspoken truth about managing geeks
Fred Wilson: 10 Ways to Be Your Own Boss