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

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.

Seems to be the next big thing in software processes land. So, hire competent peeople and try to get out of the way.

These things are all the basics you pick up by reading Learn How Not to be a Complete Failure at Software Development in 24 Hours. None of it will make your developers any less prone to do stupid shit, and none of it will prevent your systems administrators from roadblocking developers just for funsies.

Devops Is a Poorly Executed Scam

Clone ... What could possibly go wrong?

If you're a coder, you've already heard about distributed version control systems (DVCS) and git in particular. I was content, almost complacent, in my usage of subversion to manage my source code, both for personal projects and at work.

Jow Maller outlines a straightforward system for using git to manage code from development copies and branches through production. The fact that deployment to live is automated, but I'd be worried about broken or unreviewed code getting deployed unintentionally. I think the best way to prevent that is to have live be its own branch, and then pushing changes to the live branch once they've been reviewed, tested, and blessed.

Iisolani provides a thorough dissectin of how these new-fangled #! urls you are seeing all over the newest sites on the web are prone to breaking both the web experience and a site itself.  I think I see a hint of "we-know-better" from the developers rushing out these new sites and re-designs. HT: Jason Lefkowitz

Lessons: Use Cases matter, and programmers (the users in this case) will choose tools that are both simple, in that they are not complicated/over-engineered, and easy to use, requiring little setup and code to accomplish a task.  For parsing data with PHP, constrast using something like SimpleXML or DOMDocument (which is light-years better than where we were in parsing XML just 5 years ago), to just doing json_encode() or json_decode().

While trying to submit a patch to a drupal project, I ran into a problem creating a unified diff that could be suspected.  It turns out that the way I was using the built in Subversion diff tool in NetBeans wasn't the way to go.  Now, on the command line, I'm used to doing a "svn diff myfile.php > myfile.patch" to have a useable patch with the latest changes to a file.  In NetBeans, I was thinking the same way, calling up a diff and then saving the output as a patch file - but that omitted crucial information like the name of the file to patch.

Another viable option for mobile development is to use a framework like Titanium or Phonegap to quickly build out an app using Javascript.  I've been looking at Titanium a lot lately and digging into its API.  Seems like you can build anything short of a game using its API and there's a real buzz when you compile the same (or nearly the same) codebase to run on both Android and iPhone devices.

There's a new release of the the one full-blown IDE that I've managed to stick with.  If Eclipse doesn't fit your style, give Netbeans a spin - I like its inline code completion, the source-code beautifier, and the integration with SVN and Mercurial.  I particularly find the source control usability much better than Eclipse.