You may have seen the video below as it was quite popular in the last few weeks. If not, I really encourage you to watch it as it is food for thought if you hold a job where you have to manage other individuals.

Linkedin is a marvelous tool for professionals. This is nothing new and given my limited readership, we probably are connected via Linkedin already.

Here are some personal rules I follow when using the tool:

1. Don’t collect connections
2. Only Connect with people you discussed or corresponded with and whom you feel are professionals
3. Connect with co-workers and former colleagues
4. Ignore invites from people you don’t know
5. Import your list of contacts to reconnect with former business partners
6. Recommend former colleagues but not current colleagues
7. Rarely ask for a recommendation and only if you already gave one some time before
8. Use a personal e-mail address for logging in, not a work e-mail address
9. Register any new e-mail address that you expect people to use now or in the future
10. Provide a summary and complete profile. Vendors, customers, former colleagues, future colleagues, and prospective recruits are likely to examine it before engaging in business with you.

I don’t see much value in groups or discussions. Unfortunately, signal to noise ratio is very low in those forums.

I religiously follow my connections’ updates and their new connections. This is great to find common colleagues or out of touch friends.

Please share with me your personal rules for Linkedin. I am always interested in learning new tricks.

If you have not reviewed lately how modern CPUs operate and how they differs from CPUs that you grew up with, you may want to watch this video. It is quite long but certainly instructive.

You will learn about what impacts performance today and how Donald Knuth was right all along. :-)

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil” — Donald Knuth

James Bach is proposing to tutor testers via Skype for free. This is a very interesting concept and this is the first time I hear about such an experiment. I wish him success and I am looking forward to see how this develops.

As it should be, he has high expectations of his students.

In this article, Robert L. Glass, list principles, facts related to software engineering. The list is organized onto the following categories:

1. Complexity
2. People
3. Tools and Techniques
4. Quality
5. Reliability
6. Efficiency
7. Maintenance
8. Requirements and design
9. Reviews and inspections
10. Reuse
11. Estimation
12. Research

I encourage you to read this article regardless if you are new to the field of software engineering or a long timer. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded of the “law of physics’ regimenting our discipline.

[via IEEE]