I’ve been making steady progress through Joel’s latest book: The Best Software Writing. While it’s basically a rehash of his favorite blog posts, there’s definitely some interesting selections that I missed over the last few years. (Side note: I was thinking that it might be fun to write a "Worst of Software Writing" or a "Worst of Blogs" book. Good/bad idea?)

In particular, I enjoyed Eric Sink’s "Hazards of Hiring" (section ‘Hire Developers, Not Programmers’, which also lead me to "You need Developers, not Programmers"). These posts resonated with me on a personal level, probably because I’ve worked at places ranging from the small ISV struggling to survive to working at Microsoft on Longhorn (speaking on which, I’m getting antsy - I can’t wait to start talking about the things we’ve been working on).

While I’ve always personally felt that the best developers are ones that can be versatile, it rarely was with regards to their coding skills (Great! You can code, so what? So can a lot of other people.)

Instead, the best developers have the ability to see what’s going on in the industry. They understand that not all end users are rocket scientists (it’s true! they don’t want to deal with Codec Hell), and we need to be able to build software that my mom can actually use. They need to not only be able to work with marketing and sales, but can write a good spec and be able to understand that test isn’t an annoyance, but a necessity. They do what they have to do to ship.

I have to admit, working on a small team again has really had an impact on me. It’s rekindled the ’startup’ spirit in me and reminds me why I do what I do for a living.