Introduction – 10 Development Practices

If you are going to read through my “10 practices that every developer should start right now” series, then you probably want to know where these 10 practices came from, why I chose these 10 – really, what so important about secure coding anyway?   – I think that it’s important to know that these aren’t just 10 random items to fill a couple of blog posts. These are all practices that have been thoroughly thought out. This list is something that I started to formulate over a year ago based on my experience as a consultant, working as a technical editor, and discussions with countless MVPs, other consultants and in my interviews with potential consultants…

Experience. First, these 10 practices have come from over 15 years of professional development work, working with countless customers when I was at Microsoft, as well as the numerous development shops and enterprise customers that I’ve been a consultant for over the last many years. These are, what I consider, to be the biggest bang for your buck, the low hanging fruit that you can quickly implement and the practices that will yield the greatest value in the shortest time.

Writing a Book. I once had the privilege of working as a Technical Editor on a C# 3.0 book. That experience was both rewarding and frustrating. It was rewarding to go through the process, engage with the executive editors, author and see the whose process of writing a technical book move forward. It was also frustrating to know that – while everything in the book was technically accurate – it often was not the content that I would have wanted to cover. These are the things that I want to talk about.

Hiring. Over the years, but especially during my time as a Principal consultant for Improving Enterprises and now as the Senior Software Architect for Six Flags, I’ve spent countless hours interviewing various – really smart people – that often fell short. (I’m a nice guy – but apparently a pretty heavy handed interviewer). I’ve discovered that the things that matter in software development – are often not taught, even in the best schools. These are the topics that I wish every CIS/ MIS department would start covering to some extent. I sometimes wished that I had a “quick read” book that I could hand to people on their way out and say “here, read this. This is what you should know before you try to work here.”

Scope – Obviously any one of these topics could be a whole book in and of itself. So none of these posts are going to be intended as a “complete” reference or anything like that. More like “Caleb’s thoughts on the matter.”… and hopefully some useful insights, and enough information to let you, Dear Reader, move forward and know where to go from here.

So that’s my introduction. I hope that you’ll join me as we dig in to all 10 practices.

Enjoy the ride!

photo credit: flickr