I almost always have a good laugh after when I look at the code that I wrote some time ago. Which I guess is a good sign; it means that I've improved in the meantime. On the other hand, I've been in the happy situation to see most of my code go into use; some of it is still being used 8 years later.
Learning different languages seems to help me write better code in any given language. It's something I do as a hobby (this has the (un?)fortunate side effect of making me less and less fond of PHP, the language I use most at work).
At work we've recently switched to agile project managment (scrum), and now the first big (7 month) project using scrum is done. I have the feeling that the process really helped. We did change course a couple of times, and some pieces ended up being done with other applications than those originally planned. We demonstrated what we had working to the customer at the end of every three week period, and discussed what was most important to do in the upcoming three weeks. Because of this tight feedback cycle, we didn't go (too far) out on wild goose chases. And the customer was extremely happy because he knew what was going on. And because he knew what was going on, he understood when we said that implementing such-and-such feature or making such-and-such change is of course possible, but not without cutting some other feature or increasing the budget.
It's a bit of a change for the customer, and they will spend more of their time on the project than with a project using traditional project management, but the end result is better (from my experience and from what I've heard).
Slashdot Mirror
I almost always have a good laugh after when I look at the code that I wrote some time ago. Which I guess is a good sign; it means that I've improved in the meantime. On the other hand, I've been in the happy situation to see most of my code go into use; some of it is still being used 8 years later.
Learning different languages seems to help me write better code in any given language. It's something I do as a hobby (this has the (un?)fortunate side effect of making me less and less fond of PHP, the language I use most at work).
At work we've recently switched to agile project managment (scrum), and now the first big (7 month) project using scrum is done. I have the feeling that the process really helped. We did change course a couple of times, and some pieces ended up being done with other applications than those originally planned. We demonstrated what we had working to the customer at the end of every three week period, and discussed what was most important to do in the upcoming three weeks. Because of this tight feedback cycle, we didn't go (too far) out on wild goose chases. And the customer was extremely happy because he knew what was going on. And because he knew what was going on, he understood when we said that implementing such-and-such feature or making such-and-such change is of course possible, but not without cutting some other feature or increasing the budget.
It's a bit of a change for the customer, and they will spend more of their time on the project than with a project using traditional project management, but the end result is better (from my experience and from what I've heard).