Saturday, March 6, 2010

Importance of planning - the future

I just started my own company after working for 3.5 years. I started planning what we need to do as a company. It seemed to me that planning is easy job and started out writing what I would do every week starting from first week of march. I was into the 3rd week of march and boom, my mind went blank, I dint know what I will do after the 3rd week of me quitting my corporate job. That's a dangerous situation to be in.

So it got me thinking that I had never done this kind of planning and the most planning I had subjected myself was to have a TODO list for the day. But that wouldn't do in a startup where I would need a 3 month road map, 6 month road map , 1 year road map. 2-3 year road map.

I however only came up with a 8week product roadmap and it looked like this . I am working on my other road maps and will be done quite soon.

There are a lot of softwares and means to do this planning, just choose one, I just used a pen and paper and later made this diagram it tok me 30 mins to make this diagram and more than 20 hours to make it in pen and paper, doesn't look so , but take a long time. But planning helps, Its been a week since I started executing the plan and its going good, so the trick is to have a plan.

Monday, February 22, 2010

QT - things to know

As I have started working with QT, there are a few things you need to know and be careful about

1) When you have to connect a signal to a slot , you need to have a Q_OBJECT declaration in that particular class, whose object is sending the signal.
2) When connecting a signal to a slot, both the signal and the slot should take the same parameters, for example, if a signal is passing an int, the slot should also accept an int.
3) Most importantly it is better to declare your QT classes in a separate file and have cpp and .h files


Sunday, February 21, 2010

Working with QT

I started working with QT recently. The last time I started working with QT was several years ago. And my experience with it wasnt that great.

Now I have started working with the QT IDE and have really enjoyed it. The QT IDE is by far the best IDE I have worked with. The layout is better than the eclipse layout

Here is how to get a QT IDE
http://qt.nokia.com/downloads

Use the LGPL license, but its 380 MB to download.

Also QT can be integrated with eclipse
here's how
http://qt.nokia.com/developer/eclipse-integration

I have started developing some simple applications using QT. I will keep you updated on the experience