No one is irreplaceable, and that is a fact. Teams often find ways to overcome the loss of staff, even creatively. Some losses hurt more than others. One key factor is institutional knowledge. This is one area that often makes employees feel irreplaceable, but should be avoided at all costs by a business. The goodWhat grows institutional knowledge? Ambition. Employees invest into their companies by digging their heels in, often learning and growing to be the best employee they can be. It's natural: ambitious people evolve over time - they are not stagnant. And, businesses often encourage this

I personally believe cut-and-paste coding can be one of the sloppiest and least reliable ways of developing a product. Consider the source. After teaching Comp Sci for several years, I can confidently claim that this is the worst type of coding. Most of the cut-and-paste code comes from the web. Someone goes onto Stack Overflow, slaps in variables and values to meet their use case, and commits their change. Consider the source! You have no idea who posted the code, the merit of the code, or if it follows best practice. There is often a ton of metadata missing as well, e.g. the supported major

DRM is a sticky issue. I found this out the hard way recently when my Keurig machine died. BackgroundKeurig, made famous for their single-serve coffee innovation, recently released a 2.0 version of their brewing systems. This new release actually has a digital imaging system in place to look for the Keurig branding on all K-cups before brewing. In essence, they are restricting the use of their technology after people purchase it. The only noticeable feature is introducing a "coffee carafe" K cup, which, to me, is not a major selling point since regular coffee makers already do this job

I am a big fan of learning moments. In business, some learning moments come at a cost. Some mistakes are easier to forgive than others. I still believe in exercising as much patience as possible to allow people to learn. PatienceThis is easier said than done. Someone makes a mistake (or multiple). Steps need taken to correct course, mentor, and allow the mistake to serve as a positive step for the future. I can't say how many times my bosses or peers have afforded me such opportunities to grow. They demonstrated clear actionable steps, told me what needed to be done to correct the action, and

Drupal is definitely a framework enterprises can leverage. I think few would argue this. But, the term open source freaks out a lot of people. What it boils down to is how to best leverage this framework. This means that we as a community need to adopt best practices in how Drupal is used. While these best practices may be enforced when contributions are made back to the Drupal community, it certainly is at a developer's discretion on how to set up Drupal for their specific web property. As such, a tool needs to exist to measure these developers against best practice. Acquia's certification

I was recently asked about what separates my company from others I have worked in the past. What immediately came to mind was the relationship with my team, the work we do, and the sheer talent. Those elements alone still make me get up in the morning. But, over a cold beer, something else struck with me. My company has no routine and I love it. Let me Google that for youYes, this may set you back initially. Routine typically has to do with schedules or habits. But, what I am referring to is very much about our culture. We're a newer company that is still applying polish to our offerings

Estimations suck. Seriously. To do estimations properly, it requires significant analysis and a sound grip on the full project scope. It's hard. There are always unknown complexities that creep up. Estimations set expectations and impose risk when complexity is not identified. Covering RiskThere are a couple approaches people use to balance estimates with risk. The fixed percentage model just adds a near arbitrary percent on top of a given estimate for known complexity. While this is fine, it doesn't excuse a lack of effort to try to determine what the estimates should be. Another is