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/
A few weeks back we had an internal lightning talk, at STX Next [http://www.stxnext.com/], from a product owner and scrum master of one our teams. The talk was about their experience over the past year joining an existing team that, until then, had functioned without these roles.
People often come to me, and ask: “How do you get so much shit done? Why doesn’t anything fall through the cracks? Why don’t you ever seem to be bored? How can I be more like you?” The answer is simple. It’s all thanks to my very
I seem to have an irrational compulsion to blend in, to appear to be a native wherever I go. I seem to have this most strongly in foreign cities and countries. I had it when I lived in Schiedam (in the west of The Netherlands, a foreign place, since I’
Wikipedia on Murphy’s law [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law]: > Murphy’s law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Actually, the way I always heard Murphy’s law be formulated is “Everything that can