It is vital to the success of a development team that they become experts in their infrastructure and its tools. Spending the time in self-training will more than pay off in gained productivity and quality over time.

The Turk was a chess-playing machine invented in eighteenth century. It was a hoax, a box that contained a person who would move the chess pieces. After reading about the Mechanical Turk, I was thinking that perhaps Agile could benefit from this concept…then I found that such a solution already exists.

If you have been living in a cave (or busy on a big project), you might have missed the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle 2. I think all systems documentation should be published as e-books. Imagine all the documents and diagrams for a suite of projects and programs, easily referenced from a small, thin device that has long battery life and is very functional even without Internet access.

Recently, I had a customer ask me, “How can I give my UI code in Subversion its own trunk instead of having it in the same trunk as my services tier code?” This was an astute question.