The last lecture

Jeff Atwood‘s latest post on Coding Horror was interesting to me. In theory, it was about authentication for websites (and I will write a post later with my thoughts on that topic), however the best thing about that post was the video he included. It wasn’t really related to the subject of the post, just that the man giving the lecture (that late Randy Pausch) inspired the way Jeff approached the problem he faced.

I would recommend everyone watch the video. It was interesting and inspiring and at a couple of times (particularly with his final point) quite emotional.

Bugs vs feature requests

I recently re-read Jeff Attwood‘s (of Coding Horror fame) blog post That’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature Request. He talks about the eternal struggle to define a ‘bug’ as opposed to a ‘feature request’, ‘enhancement’, etc. His advice is to stop worrying about which category a piece of user feedback falls in and just worry about what to do with it.

So why do so many of us feel like we need to have these definitions?

At my current workplace I spent a bit of time reading and thinking about the “definition of a bug”. This was important for me for a few reasons. Firstly, because I generally equate a bug in the system to a developer not doing their job properly. If there are many bugs being found I feel that the dev team needs to