All Blog Posts

So I have a friend that I met at our former place of employment. In the years that we have left that employer, we have remained in contact over our love of baseball and beer. The most time we had ever spent together was 1 day. Those days were…

I once had a manager who asked me the following question: "Do you want to look back in five years and see five of the same experiences? Or, do you want to see five unique experiences, one each year?" It was a great question. I had never thought like…

The Problem If you are not there yet, the time is coming. You may be getting close, the squeeze is starting. If you are there you feel it every day. What is it? Competition for your work time. It feels like there is never enough time in the day to…

You may look around your professional life and notice many different things you'd like to try. You may be interested in being a thought leader at work, working with a specific technology, learning to mentor others, or even becoming a popular…

A technical work item can come from many different sources within an organization. Maybe it originated from a customer support ticket or a stakeholder, or the strategic road map assembled by the product team. In each of these scenarios, the work item…

Working with others can be very challenging. We all have expectations of our colleagues. Some of those expectations are explicit and written, and some are implicit. Some of them may be things we set collaboratively, such as a team working agreement…

There is a point in everyone's career when they are moving faster than they should be. Antiquated management techniques pride the program on pushing contributors to the edge increasing the efficiency of a process. After all efficient usage of time is…

The journey When one begins a career in software development, their daily activities often mostly involve writing code. There may be a team standup on the calendar every day, and perhaps a sprint review or a retrospective every week. Other than these…

If you have not already failed in your current role, you will at some point in time. It may be later today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a couple of years. There is no doubt about it, you will fail at something. It is not possible to do it all, all the…

There is no doubt about it at some point in our history we have had to solve some tough problems with our team. Maybe it was a really tough project where the team is under a heavy load for some amount of time. Eventually, everyone around those types…

Picking technologies that your team can work with is very important when delivering software. To deliver the site that you're reading this blog post on, we've chosen to use Gatsby . Gatsby is an open-source framework that builds on React. There are…

Often in our respective industries, we are faced with hard problems. Where the team knows that wrangling a solution will be difficult. There are many ways to approach these hard problems. How would your team go about handling this problem? Is there…

In my previous post , I wrote about the different stages of effectiveness a software development team can be in. As one evaluates where their team is on that spectrum, a natural question to ask is: What actions can I take to move my team up on the…

If you're on a software development team, think about the work that you do every week. What does the doing of the work look like? How often do you deliver to production? Do you understand the why behind the work you're doing? Can you influence what…

Think about a problem that you and your team recently solved. Not a problem that only took minutes to solve, or one that even the lowest skilled team member can complete without thinking about it. I'm talking about a tough problem. One that took real…