A good software developer, in addition to studying correct approaches to the design and implementation of a program product, should also spend some time on the most common anti-patterns just to be sure that he avoids them in his practice. Making up intricate stories, although it is an important property of the modern cinema and literature, is not the skill which a developer should be encouraged for.

Hi, guys! The last two months did not pass in vain - Riter v0.12.3 is now available with a lot of vital updates and bug fixes. Hurry to visit the demo company to see them on your own: extended statistics on the user and project pages, the updated demo company, advanced management capabilities along with the improved layout all over the application. As you will soon discover, a huge amount of work has been done to make your usage of the software more convenient. And here's a complete list of changes just in case you do not notice them right away.

How much time do you usually spend at work? And how many hours are you really working on tasks? Considering numerous meetings and the solution of technical issues, not to mention the discussion of quite extraneous topics and watercooler talks, the 8-hour working day is sharply reduced to 4-5 hours of productive work. And this is according to the most optimistic estimates! How could project managers prevent this waste of time? In fact, there are a few simple rules, compliance with which could significantly reduce your number of broken deadlines and failed projects.

Somewhere, say, in New Zealand, some indigenous tribes can have a language that is completely different from ours. Their terminology may have no equivalents in our speech, and the very perception of the world will seem strange to us. In this case, the principle of constructing sentences and the formulation of thoughts can be fundamentally inconsistent with what we are used to. For example, such a tribe may have no concept of "left" and "right", so aborigines are oriented in space exclusively on the sides of the world. If they have a concept of "south" or "east", their navigators will explain not the relative position of a turn, but the absolute one. It could say, for example: "After a hundred meters, keep to the south" or something like that.

Hi, guys! We hope that we managed to interest you with the theme of Ansible, and you had already time to get acquainted with it a little if you had previously used other tools. This time we would like to tell about our experience of work with Ansible. As you know, we have several applications and actively use it to automate the configuration of the infrastructure. To this end, we have developed a number of Ansible roles which you are welcome to explore and use if you wish.

Hi, guys! Continuing the topic of recruiting employees, we would like to talk about the professional skills of candidates and the requirements put forward to new specialists. How technically savvy should a newcomer be? Should you hire an experienced developer who will be head and shoulders above the rest of the team participants? Or is it enough for an employee to correspond to some average bar? What choice do you make in your company? In order to better understand the essence of the problem, it may be useful to move away from it for a moment to another area, where similar solutions have long been found.

In search of good ways to hire the most appropriate employees and eliminate obviously improper ones, you will surely come across lots of tips on this subject. Building a good team is a priority for every company, but all of them cope with this task in different ways and with mixed success. Somebody bets on expanding the search area, another one prefers a more targeted choosing of candidates, some companies spend years of continuous work for creating a talent pool and keeping contacts with prospective candidates. But how and what kind of potential employees you would not attract to your office, there comes a time when you need to make a choice for or against them. And at this moment it is important which selection criteria are decisive.

Hi, guys! In response to our requests, we continue to receive and share with you various opinions about the organization of project management processes by other companies. You can agree or disagree with these approaches, but, in any case, you are able to learn something useful for your team. For those who missed or forgot the last discussion, we remind you that it is about how to make developers and managers follow all the endless requirements of a supported methodology without sacrificing performance. Let us introduce you another solution to the problem from our readers.

Hi, guys! We continue to spread good practices on development processes got from our users so that your valuable experience becomes a common asset. Remember that you are always welcome to share your opinion on methodologies, technical and project management solutions or any other subjects you are interested in if you haven't done that before. Today we will talk about such a common job estimate as story points.