On his popular blog, The Mindset [1], Lidor Wyssocky has written some worthwhile posts recently that riff on the intersection of two current hot topics in blogland, one relating to methodology, the other to software team composition--both of which have an underlying theme of "What is the best way to enable success in building software?"

If you have not been following these threads over the past couple weeks, Lidor's posts are a good entry point. Follow the links and get lost in blogland...

Start with "Hiring Great Developers? [2]," which reacts to a hot theme introduced recently by Joel Spolsky's recent post "Finding Great Developers [3]," and which also links back to Lidor's previous post "Googlism [4]," in which Lidor reacts to Google employee's Steve Yegge's provacative "Good Agile, Bad Agile [5]" post. Finally, Lidor follows up on the team composition theme with another good one, "The Good, The Great, And The Better [6]." He writes,

Remember, you already have good people on board. You should indeed hire great developers. But don’t settle for good, and don’t settle for great either. Always look for a way to take what you have and make it better.

I agree.

It's an obvious point to make now that the blog phenomenon is so well established, but I love the fact that ideas can be introduced into the public conversation, people can react to them and introduce new ideas almost immediately, and the conversation can multiply faster than a usenet flame war (hopefully without the ad hominem attacks)--all interlinked and more or less permanently archived. In fact, I think the permanence implied by the blog format leads directly to a more civilized discussion. Both the speed of propagation/cross-polination and the more civil conversation have got to be good for the software development profession.

Thanks for reading,
Dan