Don Norman at Business of Software 2009

There's an excellent video at Neil Davidson's blog of Don Norman talking about successful products and services, which he summarizes to the following ten points (1 and 10 are meant to be the same):

1. It's all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don't be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is good: Complicated is bad
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It's all about the experience

A case for code reviews

THIS is a fabulous example why your organization/team should be performing code reviews.

We're not talking about poring over the entire code base once a month (that's just cruel); no, you check the code your teammate or colleague wrote or modified before it even goes into the main branch of the source control repository, just like how open-source projects do it.

Use Review Board: it's free and works with the modern source control systems. If you have one of the source control systems that isn't supported, have one of your teammates come to your desk to give your changes a once-over until you figure out a software solution that allows you to send them the changes so they can review it on their own time while you start working on something else.

Seriously. Stop the bad software madness in its tracks TODAY.