TLDR - Programmers are bad at giving time estimates so we shouldn’t ask them to. To be more efficient an organization should experiment with a process that simply places 3 items in each developers ‘PQueue’ and let them finish it. PQueue My tech teammate was up from Austin this week and suggested that our dev team try out a process similar to what his old team used at Demand Media. The basic idea is that instead of doing agile or waterfall, Demand Media simply assigned each developer a queue of the highest priority tasks they could be working on at that moment (with a cap of 3)....

In a pitch meeting with Dave Whorton of Tugboat Ventures a few weeks ago he said something that struck a chord with me as an entrepreneur.  Give people the opportunity to evangelize your product. He went on to give a few examples of products that do it well: Nest The Nest Thermostat is a thermostat that uses machine learning to save energy (and money) on your energy bills, but Nest also has an iPhone app that lets you control your thermostat remotely....

Junior developer (for purposes of this post)is a developer with < 2 years experience programming in industry who have an interest in sharpening their technical skills. I recently graduated from Stanford with a degree in Computer Science. I’ve been programming for 4 years and feel comfortable claiming ~1.5 years industry experience through summer internships, failing as a solo founder, being a lead engineer for a startup, various freelance gigs, and my current position at a mobile health startup I helped found in December....