Carl Erickson observes that a small, boutique team of developers can be massively more productive than a larger team.

When a prominent developer and contributor lashes out that Drupal is in dire straits, you better listen.  You ought to read his critique of how Drupal core development is stalling, or at least stuck in the mud.  That can't be good news for anyone looking to upgrade to Drupal 7.  My thoughts after the quote.

Matthew at DogStar describes his PM toolbox today, The Project Management Tool Box | Opensource, Nonprofits, and Web 2.0.  It's a detailed and well organized list, and I think reflects a very practical approach. The first thing that strikes me, is the overwhelming amount of tools available to the would-be PM.  Certainly, there is no lack of tools out there.

I really, really hope that it doesn't come to a work stoppage. As in most labor negotiations, it seems like a lot of posturing on both sides. The players really don't have a lot of leverage without threatening a strike or stoppage. Let's hope both sides don't get too close to the brink that there is no turning back.

I guess the cat is out of the bag now. This is something I get to work on in the off-season, a new digital platform for the league and its teams. If only I could travel back in time 8 years to tell myself I'd be working on this.

I've been finding that maintaining a fairly accurate todo list has helped me concentrate on finishing tasks and avoiding "multi-tasking". I really like Hiveminder, an online todo list manager. It's really easy to enter tasks - you can just type something like "Post article about multitasking on bloc [due Wednesday][blog]" to create an item that is due the next Wednesday and tagged "blog.".

Or, learning to love process/order and prevent chaos

TLC's show Jon & Kate plus Eight has both of us hooked.  We started watching after we learned we were expecting Nicholas, partially in a funny "At least we don't have eight kids" way.  But the show is entertaining, and has given us a couple of clues about being parents that might be helpful down the road.  Nothing super revelatory, but stuff that is good to hear again.

Sandy sent me a link listing anti-patterns as applied to management practices. For those not up on the jargon, an anit-pattern is a bad practice that is repeated frequently. I first heard this term in terms of programming patterns and anti-patterns, but I've since heard it used in non-programming contexts. I can honestly say I've run into the Hard Code anti-pattern, code-momentum, cargo cult programming, and bug maganets, to name a few.

I have to confess that delegating software installation to Debian and Ubuntu's apt command is what finally converted me to Linux.  I stillhave a bias against .rpms and building from source based on disastrous experiences hunting down obscure .rpms or figuring out why make would not work.  If you're trying out Ubuntu or another Linux distribution, you should stop and read download squad's Package management 101. 

Amazingly insightful easy, as usual, on coding horror about The Two Types of Programmers.