How Leaders Embed and Transmit culture?
Culture is often defined as “the way we do things around here”.
Organizational culture is the leaders’ responsibility as “culture is the shadow of the leader”.
Primary Embedding Mechanisms
What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis
How leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises
How leaders allocate resources
Deliberate role modeling, teaching, and coaching
How leaders allocate rewards and status
How leaders recruit, select, promote and excommunicate
Original URL:
http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net/2009/06/15/how-leaders-embed-and-transmit-culture/

How do you identify leaders?
The need to empower natural leaders isn’t an HR pipedream, it’s a competitive imperative. But before you can empower them, you have to find them. In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record—it’s easy to discover who’s in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don’t appear on any organization chart. To hunt them down, you need to know . . .
1.    Whose advice is sought most often on any particular topic?
2.    Who responds most promptly to requests from peers?
3.    Whose responses are judged most helpful?
4.    Who is most likely to reach across organizational boundaries to aid a colleague?
5.    Whose opinions are most valued, internally and externally?
6.    Who gets the most kudos from customers?
7.    Who’s the most densely connected to other employees?
8.    Who’s generating the most buzz outside the company?
9.    Who consistently demonstrates real thought leadership?
10.    Who seems truly critical to key decisions?
Original URL:
http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net/2009/06/15/gary-hamels-nine-ways-to-identify-natural-leaders/

Where do you place your best people?
“Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems”
Original URL:
http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net/2009/04/05/where-do-you-place-your-best-people/

How do you get your team to do the right thing?
http://blog.softwareprojects.org/be-the-change-you-wish-to-see-1741.html

Elements of Project Leadership
http://blog.softwareprojects.org/elements-of-project-leadership-1745.html

Coping with Change on Scrum Projects
Most people do not like change. I know I don't. But one thing is certain; adopting an agile approach to software development requires considerable change in an organization, whether it is corporate culture, roles or processes. As an organization switching to Agile, you are going to have to learn how to cope with change.
Original URL:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/coping-with-change

Traits That Make a Good Development Manager
Hire People you want to work with
Don’t Micromanage
Always follow up on your promises
Have excellent business domain knowledge
Have excellent Technical Skills
Create and maintain excellent relationships
Care about an individual
Participate in Team social activities
Be a process champion
Have boundless energy    
Original URL:
http://www.noop.nl/2009/07/traits-that-make-a-good-dev-manager---a-developers-perspective.html

Tom Demarco on Software Engineering
Sendhil shared this link with me. Good one
http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf

Hiring - Where It All Begins and Ends

Sendhil shared this interesting link with me. Very interesting post and I am sure whoever is involved in hiring, would have definitely experienced this.  

Slope One Algorithm

I have browsed and purchased multiple times in amazon.com and have seen this section “Customer who bought this item has also bought”. I always thought, it’s not a very complex piece and it’s easy to find out what the other person has purchased and display it in this section. In one of the products, we are implementing this functionality and I was searching in web for reference and landed in this page.

It is not as simple as I thought. It uses a technique called collaborative filtering and there is a more specific technique to implement this (Item based collaborative filtering).

Item-based collaborative is just one form of collaborative filtering. Other alternatives include user-based collaborative filtering where relationships between users are of interest, instead. However, item-based collaborative filtering is especially scalable with respect to the number of users.

Link to the sample source code (T-SQL, C#) is also available.

Technical Debt - Definition and Resources: From Brad Appleton's Blog.

Technical Debt [a.k.a. Design Debt] is the accumulated amount/cost of rework that will be necessary to correct and/or recover from the deviation between the current design of the system, versus that which is minimally complex yet sufficiently complete to ensure correctness & consistency for timely delivery. This effort grows more than linearly over time as a system becomes bigger and more complex.