Tips for Working with Programmers

  • Your design will never be “perfect”

    I have unhappy news for you. Your design will never be perfect.

    This can be very frustrating to some people. (Probably perfectionist people like me.) They We will spend days/weeks/months agonizing over a design trying to make it perfect.

    But it can never be perfect. There will always be trade-offs. Some choices will make your app more maintainable. Others will make it perform better. Some choices will make your app easier to use. Others will make it easier to code.

    In one recent design meeting, we focused on a decision between ease of data retrieval and a more descriptive data ...

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  • Project success tip: Provide a single point of contact

    Whenever I’ve heard people talk about the importance of a single point of contact for communication between the developer and the “customer”, I’ve thought this was primarily to protect team members from unnecessary emails and meetings. But what I’ve come to realize is how important this is to project health generally, for a couple of reasons:

    Consistent message

    If only one person is giving the programmer feedback, they are less likely to get conflicting messages about how things should work.

    Less communication about the communication

    As a programmer on the outside of an organization, I often can’t tell who will ...

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  • The cynicism of hourly fees for programming

    StopWatch Most programmers who have been around a few years can tell you horror stories about a software project they worked on. The stories are varied, but most of them involve an “unreasonable” customer who kept changing their minds, and the project suffered from lots of rework and frustration, or perhaps didn’t even get finished. (Even I have a story like that.)

    Which is why programmers are often surprised to learn that I don’t charge by the hour. They’ll ask, “Aren’t you worried that the customer will change their mind repeatedly and you’ll lose money?”

    Not really.

    Most customers aren’t ...

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  • How to learn about secret software bugs

    Top_Secret_resized One of the more frustrating aspects of being a programmer is that sometimes users encounter problems you never hear about. It isn’t anyone’s fault – I don’t always notify people when the software I use generates an error either. It takes time and effort, and I often think “they probably already know”. 

    But honestly, we don’t always know about the problems users encounter. Especially on smaller software projects with a limited number of developers and testers, we’re unlikely to test every single scenario. So the problem a user discovers may not be anything we tested for or have seen ourselves.......

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  • Ask the Programmer: Why can’t I “own” my code?

    question mark Ask the programmer is a feature designed to answer questions from non-geeks about hiring and working with programmers. If you have a question, please email me at avonelle@lovhaug.com.

    Question: Why doesn’t your custom software contract grant my company ownership rights for the code. I’m paying for the software, shouldn’t I be the owner?

    Answer: To start out, we need to have a common understanding of what is included in custom software. Most custom software is made up of several different things:

    • Controls, components, or libraries written by third parties and purchased by the developer
    • Controls, components, or libraries ...

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Painful code moment
Small bug can only be fixed
Just with big rewrite.

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Avonelle is a talented expert in her field. She has blended well with our team and built applications that we are proud to deploy to our associates. Her talents helped us execute a vision expediently and with quality. If we could do it all over again, we wouldn’t change a thing.

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