Ramone

I'd be interested to hear about (1) that scrum failure in the 10's of millions of dollars, and (2) what you prefer instead of Agile.

(I'm a developer on a scrum team and really think it helps us, but I'm not dogmatic about it or anything... I'd like to hear about the other side. I'm surprised that a huge scrum failure is possible because the customer is generally shown everything at regular small intervals, so it's hard to imagine how a project could get so far off course.)

edit: grammar

Isn't this the opposite of "pick the right tool for the job"? Building with whatever you're most comfortable seems to be a superficial reason. Different platforms/languages have real diversity in their strengths and weaknesses.

This is such a huge question, but the 3 things that have helped me most:

(0) Make sure you are clear on your requirements, and spend the time to do the research/prototype if you're not. Estimates have no hope in being right if you don't know exactly what you're going to do.

(1) Break tasks up to pieces no bigger than a day's worth of work. You do this because the larger an estimate is, the larger the margin of error on that estimate is. That's the reason that the standard "multiply-by-three" rule that many people say doesn't work.

(2) Document your tasks and estimates so you can refer to them when making new estimates. Otherwise, you don't learn, and you don't get better. My team really does this, and it really works. We order the historical tasks by the actual time-taken and estimate new tasks by fitting them in that ordering.

Keep in mind though that it's probably more important to the people that care about those estimates that you're constantly updating them on the real situation. In many scenarios it's better to be a little late while providing high-quality work VS. being on time and providing crap. To pull that off, you have to find ways to constantly report your status/progress and get that external trust.

EDIT: Added point 0 after further thought about my team's worst pain-points.

I actually agree with everything you've said there. I just don't think the top editors are different enough in feature-set to make it matter much.

Your choice of text editor is just a micro-optimization. As much as I'd like, there isn't one that will turn me into the code-whisperer.

So I know this won't be popular, but I've got to say it.

I'm baffled at these text editor debates.

It's almost like developers think that code-input is a significant part of their job. It's not. It's just some accidental complexity that goes with the territory. Speeding up your text-wrangling ability won't do anything to help you be a better/faster developer.

I use vim all the time (as well as a bunch of others) and yes of course it was an unnecessary pain-in-the-ass to learn. It's all mindless rote learning that doesn't prove anyone's smarter than anyone else either. My theory is that people won't admit this because they're already invested and on the other side of the steep learning curve.

The bottom line is that there's no editor that will make you a better programmer. If you're worried about quick input, you're probably banging out boilerplate and not working at the right level of abstraction.

I use something like this for notifying about broken builds in our continuous integration environment, but on linux with "festival". I don't know if this utility has voices or not, but it works pretty well:

echo Joe Strummer broke the build | festival --tts

You're right of course that typing speed is largely irrelevant... But there's quite a bit more to managing a large code base than how fast you can type. ;)

PHP (I assume we're still talking about PHP) has had output buffering for about a decade. So yeah that is a weird thing. ;)

Alright... In case you're going to do this anyway (I probably wouldn't have listened to me either): Assuming you're doing web development, market yourself to web-design shops as a way to enhance their client-offerings. They get all kinds of coding jobs that they can't do and routinely turn down. If you get in good with a few of those, they'll effectively do all your marketing for you after that, as well as manage the end-clients.

Don't. :)

Seriously... Free-lancing is harder work than any job you've ever had. You have to be able to handle the work you take on as well as doing the accounting and bringing in the sales. It's just not feasible for most people without really working your ass off.

And then what do you get? You certainly don't have a business, because it's unsellable as such, and it doesn't exist if you walk away. What you have is the most time-consuming job possible. You didn't even get rid of your boss... In fact now you've got more bosses.

Speaking from almost a decade of freelance experience, I'd suggest you either get some partners or get a job.