Kyle Cordes

To help create the document I mentioned earlier about the merits of custom software development, I hired a subcontract writer. The only typing I did was a bit at the start and perhaps a half-hour of editing at the end; all the rest of my input was in the form of spoken-word audio recordings, which […]

A while back Joel Spolsky wrote about “Five Worlds” of software development. Over at Oasis Digital and elsewhere, I’ve been living in two of them:

Custom, internal software that we develop as consultants.
Commercial software that we develop at our expense, then sell licenses.

As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relative advantage of each, […]

I have often given the advice to start each project with an end to end working first draft, also known as an evolutionary prototype, and sometimes I have even followed this advice myself. My own projects have been most successful when following it, such as in three projects that come to mind:

A 6+ year project, […]

I recently heard from a developer who worked on a project here for about one year, several years back. I won’t name or quote him directly; the essence of his message was:

He learned a lot during that year.
This learning was a turning point in his career.
What he learned has proved lucrative.

Of course it feels great […]

I have ongoing difficulty doing enough writing, for there is so much interesting material to read instead.
Were this not true, you’d now be reading a longer and more informative post.

I’m writing this up as advice to a rhetorical “you”, but it’s really written to a younger version of me.
Imagine that you are working on a project for a customer (or employer), who has a weekly or monthly budget limit. You are paid by the hour, for up to N hours per week; or perhaps […]