The saboteur's guide to software projects
The article presents a humorous take on common pitfalls in software project management. It outlines a 'Saboteur's Guide' that highlights practices that can lead to project failure. The author encourages readers to avoid these practices while sharing insights from his extensive experience in the field.
- ▪The guide humorously details practices that guarantee project failure.
- ▪It emphasizes the importance of proper planning and requirement gathering.
- ▪The author suggests that poor organization and morale-crushing tactics can derail development.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Kkovacs |
| Canonical URL | https://kkovacs.eu/saboteurs-guide-to-software-projects/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 09:01:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T09:07:36.534Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T09:07:36.534Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | n-Tp0wiPBAOg |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The saboteur's guide to software projects May 3, 2025·5 mins Management Author Kristof Kovacs Software Architect & DevOps Consultant Hello, I’m Kristof, a human being like you, and an easy to work with, friendly guy. I've been a programmer, a consultant, CIO in startups, head of software development in government, and built two software companies. Some days I’m coding Golang in the guts of a system and other days I'm wearing a suit to help clients with their DevOps practices. Table of Contents Failure-Seeding Planning Requirement-Minefield Specs Division-Sowing Organization Morale-Crushing Development Endless-Testing Nightmare Knowledge-Destroying Ops One of the funniest reads for large orgs is the declassified "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" (1944): the CIA (then OSS) guidelines for the…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Kkovacs.
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