Good to see the perspective of a developer working in the trenches of a dev shop where often startups go to get the grunt work done.

Anarchogeek calls it the underbelly of the software development world. An apt description.

In a post today, Evan Henshaw describes the good, the bad and the ugly of of logging consulting hours. It’s a good story about the tools he uses, the reasons for detailing your tracking hours and some excellent examples of the good, the bad and the ugly that comes when developers write their descriptions for the work they’ve done.

Here they are:

GOOD – “Implement Connect Flow Header to Confirmation step, routes modification for testing, style changes, copy modification”
GOOD – “Clean up validations of Deal/PurchaseOrder. Fix bug with Purchase order and refund”
GOOD – “Updating rubydeps for ruby 1.9 to create a dependency graph”
GOOD – “#meetings discussing high-level architecture, services, jobs, and the implementation of the customer FSMs”
GOOD – “Fix purchase order creation for new customers WIP”
GOOD – “Fixing template error in collect_address_data partial”

BAD – “We have a bazillion pending tests. See to that.”
BAD – “Analytics, resque, etc.”
BAD – “Changes in coffeescript models”
BAD – “Changes for KM and GA”
BAD – “oauth”
BAD – “Pairing with pablo”
BAD – “Pairing with pote”
BAD – “Js client”
BAD – “Meeting with Clark”
BAD – “Fixing Mixpanel gem bugs”
BAD – “Fixing sign up issues”
BAD – “integration tests”
BAD – “Improve site usability”

UGLY – “” (Thursday Feb 2 – 0:45)

Services Angle

How about that last one, huh? Henshaw says his group, Cubox, uses minutedock. What do you use?

I liked this blog post, especally in how he describes the ways programmers are judged. Often it’s not the code at all but the window dressing such as the blog posts, talks and such.The star programmers get recognized for what they have built and how they communicated it. As Dave Winer says, it’s about narrating your work. For contractors that narration comes in how well you communicate the hours that you have logged. For in the end, that is how clients ultimately judger your work.