Best of Project Management — November 2025

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   Article

   rryyqn·26w

   How to burn $96.5 million on a failed website redesign

   Australia's Bureau of Meteorology spent $96.5 million on a website redesign that failed so badly it had to be reverted after 9 days. Users couldn't access critical weather data, farmers lost access to rainfall information and GPS coordinate searches, and the radar maps became unreadable. The government initially claimed the project cost $4.1 million, but investigation revealed $78 million went to a private consultancy. The federal government intervened and forced a rollback to the original site.

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   Article

   daniel.haxx.se·29w

   Yes really, curl is still developed

   curl's lead developer addresses the common misconception that the project is no longer actively developed. Despite maintaining a stable user interface for decades, curl is currently experiencing its highest development activity ever. The project continuously evolves to keep pace with changing internet standards, protocols, and security requirements while prioritizing backwards compatibility. The team refactors internal architecture regularly without breaking existing APIs or command-line interfaces, viewing this stability as curl's core strength. With nearly 30 years of history, the project is being developed with the mindset that it could remain relevant for another 70 years.

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   Article

   A Java geek·26w

   My first real Rust project

   A developer shares their experience building their first production Rust project: a health monitoring component that polls sensors and sends email alerts. The post covers the technical rationale for choosing Rust over JVM languages (short-lived processes, cross-compilation, memory efficiency), selecting appropriate crates (reqwest, config, lettre), leveraging Rust's derive macros for trait implementation, and troubleshooting Windows compilation issues with the GNU toolchain.

   80

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4. 4
   Article

   Lobsters·27w

   your project fucking sucks

   Open-source communities face pollution from low-effort, dishonest projects that prioritize marketing over substance. These "slop projects" mimic the aesthetics of legitimate open-source work with fancy websites, contribution guidelines, and roadmaps, but lack real problem-solving value. The author argues for cultural gatekeeping to preserve open-source values, distinguishing between beginner mistakes (acceptable) and dishonest performance (harmful). Red flags include AI-generated content, premature community scaffolding, tech-stack-focused descriptions, and projects announced before implementation. The solution is simple: build real things that solve actual problems, or be honest about learning projects.

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5. 5
   Article

   Work Chronicles·29w

   (comic) When everything is high priority, nothing is

   A comic illustrating the common workplace problem where marking everything as high priority effectively makes nothing a priority. The piece highlights how poor prioritization practices dilute focus and reduce team effectiveness.

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   Article

   Game Developer·27w

   Take Two CEO: Rockstar chasing 'perfection' with GTA VI

   Grand Theft Auto VI has been delayed to November 2026, marking a 13-year gap since GTA V. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick attributes the delay to Rockstar's pursuit of perfection, emphasizing the studio's culture of performance and excellence. The announcement came alongside strong Q2 financial results, with Take-Two recording $1.96 billion in net bookings. GTA V continues to perform well with over 220 million lifetime sales, and the company expects GTA VI to deliver record-breaking results when it launches.

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   Article

   The Polymathic Engineer·28w

   How to Estimate the Duration of a Task

   Eight practical strategies help software engineers provide accurate task estimates across different scenarios. The guide covers leveraging past experience, consulting colleagues, timeboxing refactoring work, clarifying requirements for new features, prototyping unfamiliar integrations, learning mature technologies, evaluating cutting-edge tools, and breaking down complex projects with multiple unknowns. Key principles include documenting completed work for future reference, adding buffer time for learning curves, building proofs-of-concept before committing to estimates, and being transparent about risks and uncertainties.

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   Article

   Hacker News·26w

   What They Don't Tell You About Maintaining an Open Source Project

   A developer shares lessons learned from maintaining Kaneo, an open-source kanban board. Key insights include: documentation is never finished and requires constant iteration based on user feedback; support requests reveal unexpected use cases and edge cases; feature requests require careful evaluation against project scope; database migrations are high-stakes operations requiring extensive testing; and managing contributions involves balancing appreciation with architectural consistency. The piece emphasizes that maintenance work exceeds initial development effort, requires setting boundaries while staying helpful, and that engaged users become collaborators who improve the project through bug reports and contributions.

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   Article

   Laravel News·28w

   New Book: Laravel for the Rest of Us launches November 18, 2025

   Pete Heslop's book "Laravel for the Rest of Us" launches November 18, 2025, targeting non-technical readers like founders and project managers who work with Laravel developers. With a foreword by Taylor Otwell, the book explains Laravel concepts in plain language, covering topics from open source basics to the Laravel ecosystem. All profits will be donated to Larabelles, a community supporting women and non-binary people in the PHP ecosystem.

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    Article

    80 LEVEL·28w

    Low Morale, Falling Stocks, GTA VI Delay: What's Going On at Rockstar?

    Rockstar Games faces controversy after laying off 30-40 employees, allegedly for unionization efforts, though the company claims it was for leaking confidential information. The Independent Workers' Union disputes this, stating the private Discord group only discussed working conditions. GTA VI's delay to November 2026 and an 18% stock drop followed the layoffs. An anonymous Rockstar developer revealed that fired workers included veterans across multiple roles, all union members, many from organizing committees. The developer reports morale is at rock bottom, with remaining union members working in fear of similar termination.

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