Motivating developers
I learned something today that doubtless, a ton of PMs before me have learned: Motivating a developer is infinitely crucial if you want to get creative work done. A developer will balk like a stubborn mule if they’re not motivated correctly to design good code.
Some clarity: I speak of developers in a general sense even though I am a Program Manager. This could be Me in another setting (Yes, I can write code, ya heard!!) absolutely.
The thing that actually happened was that there was a hard engineering problem to do with Outlook Express: we’ve been thinking about how to scratch the big itch that is the *identities* code – the part of OE that allows you to change who you are or perhaps allows multiple people to share the application and provides some isolation while they do that. Well, migration is no piece of cake! I looked at this problem a couple of times and decided that it was very expensive. Because of an unrelated redesign that was exciting, one of the key people working on the project figured out what I consider an elegant solution. This has basically put the itch back on the table to be scratched. Of course the thing to note here is that when the developer had an interest, the solution suddenly materialized. Hrrmph.
On a geek note, if you want to map a network share to a drive very quickly so you can execute some command line goodness: use PUSHD. From /?:
Stores the current directory for use by the POPD command, then changes to the specified directory.
PUSHD [path | ..]
path Specifies the directory to make the current directory.
If Command Extensions are enabled the PUSHD command accepts network paths in addition to the normal drive letter and path. If a network path is specified, PUSHD will create a temporary drive letter that points to that specified network resource and then change the current drive and directory, using the newly defined drive letter. Temporary drive letters are allocated from Z: on down, using the first unused drive letter found.
