For the past 6 months I’ve had the opportunity to work on one of the best projects of my career. This thing has all the buzzwords: big data, social media monitoring, semantic analysis, kanban, ruby on rails, github, distributed teams, expertsourcing, skype video, lean, pragmatic, platform, you name it. The team is brilliant and highly skilled in their areas of expertise (rails programming, UI/UX development, architecture). Each member cares deeply about their craft and is highly passionate about our project. We argue, we collaborate on great ideas, and all stress the difference between opinions and facts.
This quick reflection just reminds me that building software is amazing. It’s not writing up exhausting requirements that no one cares about, it’s not outsourcing all of your technology to a vendor, it’s not making stupid decisions that leads to wasting money and not shipping product. Building software is about being creative, respecting the craft and the team and adapting quickly to a changing environment while relying on tried and true principles. I can’t wait to see what shows up in the next “git pull”.
Kelly Taylor's Blog 