VoodooPad 2.0 post-mortem: "Gus Mueller wrote a VoodooPad 2.0 post-mortem. I love stuff like this and wish more programmers would write about writing their software."
(Via inessential.com.)
Part of me wants to comment on the VoodooPad 2.0 post-mortem itself - namely the authors dropping of outliner support. There are no good collaborative outliners that I know of on Mac OS X, and when thinking through a project, it's just how I like to think. Also, while NotePad is a good outline database, it differs from the more free form associative structure that VoodooPad and DevonThink have. And while DevonThink claims outliner capabilities, it's difficult to reorder entries in the same level, and has neither the speed nor intuitiveness of OmniOutliner or NoteBook when used in outline mode.
There are a lot of great applications out there for Mac OS X right now, but no single application does quite enough for what I want. And I don't mind that, per se. I like the concept of small applications that do one or two things well than applications that do a lot of things poorly. But I still lament the death of OpenDoc. It would be cool to use the search and categorization features of DevonThink while being able to use OmniOutliner or OmniGraffle documents inside the system.
But what I really wanted to mention, briefly, is project post-mortems. It's been a long time since I've done one, or taken part in one, but they are great things to do after a project. When done personally, it's just interesting to introspect what was done and what wasn't done and why. And in a group environment, it's just as interesting if not more so. Of course it's all moot if notes aren't taken and points aren't remembered. It's also interesting to sit in on post-mortems of other company projects in order to see what worked and what didn't. It's also interesting to look at non-technical issues, such as ones related to how the project was run: How much time was spent communicating with the customer, how was it done, who did it? Was it budgeted properly? For projects of similar scope, would it benefit the project to have more non-technical help? Did management interfere too much with developers, or not help enough? What issues arose out of the contract? And so on and so on. Too often (my own little company included), we seem to always be running. Even before one project ends, another baton is handed to us and there's seldom time to evaluate what worked, what didn't, etc.