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I don’t read long blog posts very often but this week I read the latest post form the Windows 7 team from start to finish. I wasn’t even distracted as I usually am when reading long posts on the web.

I’ve written about motivation a bunch of times before here on Zen Habits, but the more I learn about it, the more I realize that motivation isn’t that complicated. Sure, there are numerous tips that can help, numerous tactics and strategies I’ve used with success. But it really all boils down to two things.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to read a book by Hal Edward Runkel called Scream Free Parenting. The title is a little misleading because the book is not really about screaming and the lessons Hal teaches go beyond just parenting. The book is about controlling your anxiety so you can build healthy relationships. The key idea of the book is that anxiety is at the root of much our conflict. Think about it… we want better behavior from our kids, we are not getting it, and not getting that desired behavior stresses us out. When we yell at our children, we are really saying "I want to be calm, you are not allowing me to be calm, I demand you change your behavior so I can be calm".

As the world economy continues to look shakier by the day, and major corporations have begun to trim work forces, it might not be such a bad idea to start looking for a new job. Sites like Craigslist, Monster, and HotJobs have a lot of listings, but they’re not well filtered. Searching for jobs on those sites can be a crap shoot, and many of the best job offers aren’t posted on those mega sites.

Tips on surviving a recession when you are a freelancer. Its not all doom and gloom in fact it could be the best of times

With the financial markets behaving like random number generators & entropy seemingly about to win, conventional wisdom holds that the tech sector is hosed. Au contraire ... for the geeks who understand, this is an awesome time to be doing something new.

Growing and designing a language has been shown to be hard. Most people who think they could solve a problem with a DSL are not good language designers => disaster.

Just yesterday I received the book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware" by Andy Hunt. I browsed through the TOC, read the introduction and started the second chapter "Journey from Novice to Expert". Even though it was quite late in the night, I just couldn't put the book down until I finished this chapter.

After reading an article of Martin Fowler about “Software Architects”: Who Need Architects? , I came to this point: MOST IMPORTANT product of a Software Architect (SA) is The Prototype Project.

Just over a week ago, I took the Sun Certified Web Component Developer (Java EE 5) exam. I’m going to share the positives and negatives of the experience so you can learn if you want to take then exam, and how to go about studying.

Any project plan is a mixture of what the product owner wants and what the team can actually deliver. The product owner naturally wants more than the team can deliver, so s/he has to prioritize in order to get something useful in the desired timeframe. How do you convert an unordered list of features into a prioritized product backlog which you can give the team to implement? What should you do first? Let’s take a look at some widely used strategies for prioritizing the product backlog: Minimum Marketable Feature Set, Business Value First, Bang For Buck, Technical Risk First, Defer Risk, Vote

A practical guide on when and how to outsource some of your software testing activities

In this part of the series, I'll talk about what we did when we approached what we thought was going to be the end of the project. As it turned out it was only the first deadline that we would miss. Near the first deadline we went off of doing Scrum sprints and planning in favor of fixing bugs as they came up in testing. This cost us a lot of team cohesion and focus. Read on to hear about what led us to missing the deadline, why we went off Scrum and how we got back on the right path.

Microsoft's .NET framework on Linux is getting a big boost with the official release Monday of Novell's Mono 2.0. The Mono 2.0 release is Novell's open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET platform. With the latest version, the gap between the two is getting smaller. Even though Mono 2.0 is compatible with Microsoft's .NET 2.0, it's not in full compliance with the latest .NET releases from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). The Mono effort is important as it is intended to enable .NET (define) applications to run on Linux.

After you work in IT organizations enough, eventually you build up a list of things you would really like to never see again. Sadly they never seem to go out of style.

I have been wondering for some time now what other developers read when they are fresh out of bed with coffee in hand! If you're like me, you have this long list of technology feeds you track every day using your favorite feed reader to keep you updated on the latest news and best practices of your field. And god knows it evolves fast in our specific field! So today I'm taking the lead and making my technology feeds on Netvibes public.

Last week was my 6 year ‘anniversary’ as a professional software developer. I like to look back on the past occasionally so i figured this is a good occasion to do so. I started working for Item Solutions (which we all refer to as Item) on October 2, 2002. At that time, it was hard to find a job as a software developer unless you had a few years of experience under your belt. I actually wanted to find a job in the Java world, or C++. After a few months of searching, i still hadn’t found a job and then an opportunity at Item kinda presented itsel

Proverbs are used to express universal truths or life lessons in a short and memorable fashion. I find that they are a great way to keep things in perspective, both in life and in work. Because of this, I have assembled 10 programming proverbs that every developer needs in their arsenal.