Joel Spolsky’s article on Inc.com is a must read. Here are five easy steps to kill your technology project:

Mistake No. 1: Start with a mediocre team of developers.
Mistake No. 2: Set weekly milestones.
Mistake No. 3: Negotiate the deadline.
Mistake No. 4: Divide tasks equitably.
Mistake No. 5: Work till midnight.

Read an explanation of each mistake in “How Hard Could It Be?: Five Easy Ways To Fail”. Thanks to Kenneth Bowen for prodding me to read it.

Some ads speak for themselves. This one showed up in my Gmail sidebar today:

Hint: “Certificaiton” isn’t a word. Maybe they aren’t targeting English teachers.

The RSS Profile is a really helpful document that helps developers use best practices and avoid typical pitfalls when handling or producing RSS feeds.

That said, why isn’t the RSS Advisory Board - the very people who created the profile - following the profile recommendations in their own feeds?

The Feed Validator now produces warnings according to the profile, but this table shows nearly all of the individuals on the board aren’t following their own advice.

To date, these board members have valid RSS 2.0 feeds that don’t conform to the profile: Eric Lunt, Jake Savin, Jenny Levine, Brent Simmons. Matthew Bookspan and Randy Charles Morin don’t even have valid RSS 2.0 feeds at the time of this writing.

One might reasonably argue that the members shouldn’t put the profile into practice until it is ratified. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it is a lost opportunity to show that the profile is easy to follow. Besides, the profile was ratified a week ago. Time to eat your own dog food, guys.

Full disclosure: TechBrew’s RSS feed doesn’t meet all the recommendations of the profile either.