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Book Review: “Accelerate” by Nicole Forsgren et al.

The book Accelerate – Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren et al. is an eye opener and game changer for everyone involved in software development. Nicole provides empirical evidence why teams that apply best practices like test and deployment automation, continuous integration, loosely coupled architectures and team empowerment by far outperform teams that don’t. Following the practices of the Agile Manifesto, eXtreme Programming and Scrum enables teams to deliver software both faster and with higher quality than teams ignoring these practices. Trade-offs between speed and quality are debunked as lame excuses.

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Book Review: “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

My favourite business book of 2018 is It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. The reason why people work crazy hours is not that there is

[…] more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there’s hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it. People are working more but getting less done. It doesn’t add up – until you account for the majority of time being wasted on things that don’t matter.

The authors call out working crazy hours for not being “a badge of honor” but “a mark of stupidity”. Yes, it’s good to hear this from people who know what they are talking about. Jason is the CEO and David the CTO of Basecamp, which they have been running very successfully since 2003. They describe in the book how – at Basecamp – they replaced crazy at work with calm at work.

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Finding Projects as a Freelance Software Developer

Three years ago aged 45, I started as a freelance software developer in Southern Germany. It were three pretty amazing years. I had paid work for 522.5 days of 750 working days, which amounts to nearly 70% of total working days. My hourly rate was roughly 94 Euros with 8 hours per day. Additionally, I passed on 285 days of work to other developers at a rate of 61 Euros. Despite this success, finding projects still feels a bit like black magic. Sometimes I could have got three projects at the same time. Sometimes I struggled for several months to find the next project. I want to share my experience in finding projects: what worked for me and what didn’t.
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