Since I'm looking for work, let me tell you what I look for in a project. I don't look too hard at the languages, platform, or libraries being used; I know the most important ones and can learn their relatives and competitors without too much effort.

What I want to know about a start-up is this: do you have a secret sauce, and do you know how long the schlep will be?

In software development, Agile is the most popular form of project organization and Jira by Atlassian is the most common tool used to keep track of that organization. But two different ideas from two very different places and times have convinced me that Agile is the primary cause of developer burnout.

I make it a habit to never respond directly on The Orange Site, but a recent post there caught my attention and I wanted to respond to the poor guy. He said that he was on his third startup since getting out of university, but he'd never worked at "a big company" and feared that he'd somehow made it to 30 (OMG!) without ever learning "the right way to do something."

There is no right way.