I recently listened to Alex Martelli speak on Highly-technical Management of Software Development via Open Source Conversations. Even though he is focusing on managing software development, many of his points apply to other technical and non-technical aspects of a company.
I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I hadn’t thought about some of the reasons he gives for NOT working more than about 40 hours a week as the norm. Like, if you plan for 60 hour work weeks, what do you do when something blows up and demands more of your time? Keeping the normal work week schedule reasonable gives you some breathing room to work more during the occasional week where everything falls apart. In hindsight I’m thinking: duh, why haven’t I ever put it that way?
Guy Kawasaki brings out some interesting points about business. Ten Things to Learn This School Year picks on the general theme that what you learn in school is often completely opposite what is useful in business. Some of these points are brought up in his Art of the Start presentation.
I’ve been working on slides for a presentation at work and I’m trying to take Guy’s 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint to heart. These are also covered in the Art of the Start talk as well. I like the 30 point font rule. As part of this I’ve been using Gliffy for some of the diagrams in the presentation. I’m not a heavy diagram user so I don’t have a detailed comparison of Gliffy versus Visio, but I will say that so far Gliffy has been a pleasure to use.
Robert Treat brings up some interesting points in his Open Source “Business” Models post. I’ve long believed that hiring an open source developer and allowing him or her to spend a significant amount of time continuing to work on open source projects is a great way to support open source projects. Robert points out some interesting details about the PostgreSQL core team:
…of the 26 developers listed on our “Major Developers” list, only two work for the same company (Command Prompt)
PostgreSQL isn’t the only project to have grown into that model, he also mentions FreeBSD, Ruby on Rails and Joomla as projects with core teams that are employed by mostly different companies.
If only I had an unlimited supply of money :-)