A few months ago a new engineer joined our team. As always I spent some time with him to better understand the type of person he is, what drives him. We usually talk about past experience, but more importantly: future goals. As it turned out, he had an interesting one:
Or: why is nobody listening to me!? Does this sound familiar? “They just do whatever they want.” “They don’t listen to our suggestions, whatever we try.” “Whatever they say goes.” “They talk as we’re not even here.” “They micro manage us all the time, we get to make
Scheduling meetings with people, especially larger groups, by default is a hostile act. You come in and take away half an hour, an hour or more of people’s time—time they could otherwise have spent doing “real work.” On top of the meeting time itself, there’s additional overhead:
Three techniques to constantly keep moving forward The best teams I’ve worked with in my career share one thing in common: they’re very disciplined about improving themselves (as people and as a team), how they work (process), and their environment (the other parts of the organization they work
Once upon a time, a team got into a cycle of putting out fires that escalated to a point where productivity practically grind to a halt. When one issue was fixed, another popped up. It was like a game of whack-a-mole. It never stopped. This team had been in this
Turning “programmers” into “product engineers” For the last couple of months we had a DevOps [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps] guy in our team. This is still unusual in our organization, most DevOps aren’t assigned to specific teams, they just work in a separate DevOps department that does
TL;DR: Camera on. Microphone on. Go. For my entire industrial career my work relied on effective video calls. I started working as a remote employee for three years, then as a “local” employee, but communicating a lot with remote customers on a day-to-day basis. Today, too, a lot of
Why I wouldn’t want to go back being a developer It’s the first thing people ask me when they find out that I used to be one of them. “Don’t you miss it? I hear you were pretty good, why did you switch to management, did they
A production application needs to be deployed to at least 2 servers or it doesn’t exist. Application state need to be stored in at least 3 places or it doesn’t exist. Code needs to have tests (unit, integration, automated acceptance) or it doesn’t exist.
You’re one of them— one of those 10x developers. The cream of the crop. You know how to build things, and build them well. Technical challenges don’t scare you — you got a track record of getting them done. People like working with you, because they know they will
I don’t consider myself a big reader in the traditional sense — I don’t read any fiction, for example. What I do read is work and career related, because that’s my passion. But, reading has been getting harder as my life got more busy (think: wife, job, son)
Recently I joined one of the STX Next [http://www.stxnext.com/] projects as part of the development team. As many of our projects, it is not a greenfield project — there is an existing code base already (Google App Engine [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/] with Ionic [http://ionicframework.com/
