Archive For The “Process” Category

Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Executive

Last night, Tom Klienpeter sent me The Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Executive Summary. They must have hardy executives in Japan in that the executive summary runs 86 pages in length. Overall, It’s an interesting document but I only managed to read in to the first page before starting to…

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Joel Spolsky: 12 Steps to Better Code

Back in 2000, Joel Spolsky published a set of 12 best practices for a software development team. It’s been around for a long while now and there are only 12 points but it’s very good. Simple, elegant, and worth reading: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. Thanks to Patrick Niemeyer for sending this…

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Inteviewing Program Managers

Some time back I got a question on what I look for when hiring a Program Manager from the leader of a 5 to 10 person startup. I make no promise that what I look for is typical of what others look for – it almost certainly is not. However, when I’m leading an engineering…

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Blog Data Corruption

The only thing worse than no backups is restoring bad backups. A database guy should get these things right. But, I didn’t, and earlier today I made some major site-wide changes and, as a side effect, this blog was restored to December 4th, 2007. I’m working on recovering the content and will come up with…

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See you in January

I’m online over the holidays but everyone’s so busy there isn’t much point in blogging during this period. More important things dominate so I won’t be posting until early January. Have a great holiday. –jrh James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201

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Interviewing with insight at Microsoft

There are few things we do more important than interviewing and yet it’s done very unevenly across the company. Some are amazing interviewers and others, well, I guess they write good code or something else J. Fortunately, interviewing can be learned and, whatever you do and wherever you do it, interviewing with insight pays off….

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Professional Engineering

I wrote this back in March of 2003 when I lead the SQL Server WebData team but it’s applicability is beyond that team. What’s below, is a set of Professional Engineering principles that I’ve built up over the years. Many of the concepts below are incredibly simple and most are easy to implement but it’s…

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