Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Opera 8 released - with Gmail support

Opera 8 has been released.

Following are some of the interesting features:

  1. Improved security
  2. Voice support
  3. Fit to window width
  4. Support for XmlHttpRequest giving full Gmail support
For complete list list of changes review Opera 8 changelog

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Joel's interview by CFUNITED

Joel will be giving two speeches at CFUNITED - the ColdFusion technical conference coming up in Washington DC June 29th - July 1st. Michael Smith of CFUNITED interviewed him.

Following are some interesting extracts:

On an untrained project manager running a software project
A common mistake is to hope, against all evidence,that the team members are smart and will be able to organize themselves, so the newly promoted programmer decides he or she can afford to spend 80% of their time writing code and only 20% of their time managing. The trouble is that without any kind of system in place to decide what to do and in what order, chaos ensues and you either get a death march project that’s never done, or an inadequate product that nobody wants. A typical manifestation of this is that team members work on the fun things first, not the important things, so when the schedule is running late and you have to cut features all the features left to do are important features that can’t possibly be cut.

On overhead of tracking bugs and tasks of the project
Hiring an architect adds a lot of overhead to your kitchen renovation, but they both save you a lot of time and money, in the short run and in the long run! You're going to be tracking bugs and tasks anyway, it's just a question of whether you do it in an organized fashion where everyone can be on the same page, or on a whiteboard in one person's office, where it's apt to be erased by the cleaning lady.

There is another interview text of Joel available at Salon.