In the last few weeks, I've had numerous discussions involving economic theory ranging from the complex to the mundane. After having six slight variations of every single conversation, I thought I would start documenting them here. And besides, I figured I should actually put my economics minor to use..

Speaking in generalities..

When you have an employee and an employer, you have some matched and mismatched motivations. The employee wants to do the "best" work available to them and get as much compensation (money, benefits, etc) as possible. The employer wants to compensate the employee as little as possible that still gets the employee. Except in a handful of cases, a single employee will not make or break the organization. Regardless, both the employee and employer have an interest in a successful organization.. if for no other reason, everyone wants to get paid.

A few weeks ago at the PHPBenelux Conference, I gave my presentation on the rebirth of dotProject as web2project where I covered one way of rebooting a project. But after catching Elizabeth Naramore's talk on "Technical Debt" again, it got me thinking..

Within web2project, we made the deliberate decision to work on our technical debt. Even after 2 major, 5 minor, and one patch level release, we still occasionally find issues ranging from annoyances to things that will require major refactorings*. Either way, since we're steadily documenting them, we're constantly getting a better picture of the state of the system and its strengths and weaknesses.

Alternatively, we could have trashed the code and started from scratch..

The classic example is Netscape 5.

Last week I attended and spoke at the PHPBenelux conference for the first time. What's unique about this conference is that it's entirely run by the local Benelux PHP Users Group. While there was lots of PHP-specific content, it also had a good mix of community and general concept talks too.

I gave one session over the weekend called "Project Triage and Recovery" [slides available here] which was based on the simple premise:

Last week I attended and spoke at CodeMash for the first time. For those unaware - and I was until last year - CodeMash is a community run effort that just wrapped its fifth year. Unlike most of the conferences I attend, there wasn't much PHP and instead there was a heavy focus on .Net, Rails, and various functional languages. In fact, the only prominent PHPers in attendance were Elizabeth Naramore, Chris Hartjes, and organizer W. Jason Gilmore.

As of Sunday, January 9th, the first version of the Risk Management Module is available for Web2project. While I'd love to be able to describe all the changes, the conversion process covered so many aspects, it's hard to list them all. The most important ones are:

In the past couple months, I've chatted quite a bit with different startup founders. Most were non-technical people looking for a developer to expand what they have (rare) or build it from the ground up (the vast majority). In all but a few cases, something rubbed me wrong about the conversations...

In a few cases, they're using equity-only to recruit. That's a huge red flag, but not a deal breaker. In a few cases, the technical priorities are solid and clearly defined. That's a huge plus but doesn't guarantee anything. A couple have offices, most don't. The lead people vary by demographics, experience, industry, etc, etc. It wasn't until I read Ellen Beldner's post titled "Should you take a pay cut to work at a startup?" when it clicked: