I am naturally drawn to teams that work at an insane pace. The momentum, and persistent drive to increase that momentum, generates amazing results. And it’s crazy fun.
I mentioned a few months back that my team had collaborated with MSR to publish a paper to OOPSLA about some novel aspects of our programming language (see here and here).
It’s really hard to build a great team. It can take years of hard work and an enormous amount of patience.
The very notion of “authority” is 90% in your head. And it’s one that often holds back otherwise very capable people.
The best people in software have an innate ability to communicate using code. They have an idea and simply code it up, thereby making it reality. In fact, the best people are, I would say, obsessed with code.
I’ve been managing software teams for several years. Perhaps more importantly, I have worked for some excellent leaders and have had the opportunity to learn from their good (and bad) habits.
I mentioned recently that a paper from my team appeared at OOPSLA in October:
.NET has a lovely property: it’s got a single string type.
A glimpse of some research we’ve done recently just appeared at OOPSLA last week:
I often wish that .NET had erred on the side of offering postmortem instead of premortem finalization.