Get your head together

Ideas are what moves this world forward. The special thing about ideas is, we all have them. The difference is made when you act upon an idea instead of just forgetting about it. One reason people choose not to act on an idea is a feeling of the idea being incomplete. Most times they are right, an idea is rarely fully functional at first and the first idea is almost never the best. To act upon an idea you first have to groom the idea, give it time to grow and look upon it at different times while in different emotional states. An obstacle in this is finding a way to catalog your ideas. Most of the time people trust themselves not to forget their ideas. While this can be true for the basis of the idea, the details of an idea...

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Don't let the bedbugs bite

If you've been a developer for a number of years you'll have come to terms with it by now : you will write bugs... often. When writing a piece of software you tend to work towards one solution and get in a state of tunnel vision not seeing clearly the effects this new code can have on other features. This in itself doesn't mean you are a bad developer. It is how you deal with those bugs that defines the quality of your work. In past years I used a number of systems with various degrees of success. In this article I will describe my own experiences with these different approaches. These experiences may (and very likely will) be different from yours so feel free to comment and discuss in the comments below. Also note that a bug tracking system can only be as good as the way you implement...

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