While project management often focuses on management of the processes, information management and other work issues, one of the most important areas often overlooked IMHO is the physical environment and how it may improve efficiency of the project workers. Joel Spolsky just moved is company to a new office and spent some time to figure out how to improve “developer workspaces”. It quite an interesting read.

It seems it’s going surprisingly well for java after a rough birth and slow adoption. This year on the JavaOne conference they celebrated the success by changing their logo and launching a new end-user oriented portal at java.com. If you’re developer, your source for information is still at java.sun.com.

I don’t know how many (Internet development) projects I’ve been on, but it’s quite a lot through the years. One thing happening over and over again is that all the ambitious goals of the project isn’t quite reached before the launch – and something is either cut short or not quite as polished as it should have been. Lately I’ve been wondering weather this is the right approach. Many of the things you leave out when the deadline starts getting closer is “the finishing touch” – this is especially true for back-ends and other invisible details everywhere.

To write efficient Mysql-powered applications a little insight in how Mysql works is needed. One often overlooked example of this is Mysqls silent column changes features, which may cause your tables to look different than you specified. I’m sure most people know, that using chars is generally faster than varchars, but did you know that Mysql may actually change your char-columns to varchars? This happens if you have a variable length column in a table (ie.

I’m sure the concept of pointless meetings is familiar - too many people gathered to discuss some issue but after spending hours together no decision has been reached - only the next meeting with a few more people. Here’s one tool which might help a little. I should begin by noticing that the idea is not my own - it has been as far as I know been used before. I came across it at the Copenhagen Business School where one of the teachers in Organization told about it (and credited it to Søren T.