I consider myself fortunate that I have a really cool and very understanding boss.
He just sent me this link. Your Developers Aren’t Slow
I wish more managers/bosses knew this. If you are experiencing any of the slow-downs that are listed in this article, your manager/boss really needs to read this.
Please pass it along to any other developers you know, too!!
V/r,
Wow what a good article and I wish I could share it. Unfortunately, my boss is not understanding at all and takes any suggestions as an insult to the way he’s currently running things. We use a single Google Doc (not even a spreadsheet) to manage 4+ developers, a few designers, our clients, and tasks. I mean, dude…
Context Switching is a huge issue, I imagine more so in small companies where everyone is wearing multiple hats. Just switching from one workspace into another takes time: you have to load a new project, sync with the server, look up passwords, and most importantly, remember what the hell the project was even about.
Hmmm… don’t suppose there’s any way to anonymously send it to him? 
[quote=“labofoz, post:2, topic:104753”]
Context Switching is a huge issue,
[/quote]Yeah, I used to work for a big telecom that had some VP on the east coast who couldn’t keep out of the weekly phone meetings… constantly changing this and that… I finally told someone that we weren’t going to make the rollout date because Mr Veep was killing it… suddenly, he was no longer part of the meetings, and we were only one day late for the rollout… then I was told that “there’s no more money and no work to do… we have to let you go.”
Bastages.
Perhaps, I am lucky but I’ve never had a unreasonable boss that gave incredibly tight deadline. That’s mostly because we have daily status meeting. This takes about 15 min and discuss what I have done yesterday and what will be done today. If something didn’t get done then I need to give ‘why’. Since my manger always know what I’m doing he/she understands what’s the appropriate deadline is. Of course, our customers always cause ‘scope creep’ and basically we always reply by asking for more funding or sacrifice other requirements. I just hope my career will always be like this.
I used to program with Delphi and it had a magnificent project manager where it was easy to switch projects. When I first started web programming I missed this tool so decided to write my own.
Below is a screenshot of the editor that has projects listed in the file menu and my project switching menu.
Important points to note that each Localhost project is a mirror image of the online version allowing easy FTP updates.
The project switching menu is activated from the Firefox Home button which calls the localhost/_menu/index.php:
Projects are switched in seconds and this also works for sub-domains.
Whoops I meant to reply to this days ago, that’s freakin awesome! I love how much more visual it is than just a static list of who-knows-what-till-you-open-it. I get switched out of projects so often that sometimes I’ll forget what I was working on a few hours ago.
Is this something you have publicly available somewhere? We could definitely use something like this at work, and since it’s browser based, maybe it could be centralized for all of our developers
Many thanks for the praise. The app was developed a long time ago and has gradually been refined.
I had to rewrite it the other day because I discovered that unlike MultiEdit or UltraEdit once a file is accidentally deleted it is gone!!!
I will have a go at tarting it up and making it available as a blog.
As soon as it is available I will let you know.
Looking forward to it!
As a developer, my view on time is different to most, particularly non-developers. I can spend 3 days on some code and it will take much less time than if I took 1 day on the same program. But the time you save by not running into problems that could have been avoided, programmers not being confused by poorly documented and unclear code, and not needing to re-write everything from scratch when someone changes their mind on how the program will be used, is not easily quantifiable.
Like a politician, you rarely get appreciated for solving problems are solved before they ever existed.
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