[Video] What is Shame Driven Development?
"We don't have control over our ambition."
Last week I wrote with thoughts on this question: How do you know a story is too big before it’s too late? But I think there’s a deeper issue here we could explore. A better question might be Why do stories get too big in the first place? If we only limit the bigness, as […]
How do you know it is too big before it is too late?
Nathan and I were discussing the abuse of burn-down charts on Twitter. He asked an important question: How do you know a story is too big before it is too late? Since this was twitter, I’ll expand the question a bit: How do you know a story is too big to finish before the end […]
[Video] The dark side of points
[Video] Crying in my office
[Video] Are you expecting perfection?
[Video] 5 questions to ask when you hear "your code sucks"
[Video] Your code yard
Do you suffer from floccinaucinihilipilification?
When you talk to your boss about refactoring code, do they exhibit floccinaucinihilipilification? If so, you might struggle to get approval for the project. (In case, like me, you haven’t heard of “floccinaucinihilipilification,” it means “the act of estimating something as worthless.” Now we both know! <grin>) When I read this definition, I saw a bit […]
"We're sneaking in training and improvements"
Many teams wish they had more time for four activities: 1. Rewriting code 2. Refactoring code 3. Training and improving skills 4. Experimentation with tech and techniques The problem is, these events don’t look like adding features, which is what bosses and clients want. Everyone is doing it. All software teams do these things, but […]
How do you deal with 30 resumes per day?
At our last Tech Leads Mentoring group, we discussed how to handle a load of reviewing 15-30 resumes per day. My primary suggestion was to create clearer filters that HR/recruiters could use to test for what you cared about: culture, tech skills, etc. This would allow you eliminate many unqualified candidates quickly, and pursue the best […]
Wrangle your stories
Have you noticed I tell a lot of stories? Falling off a cliff. Deleting 50k lines of code. The time I was told I didn’t have the, ahem… _backbone_ to manage a department. You might think I’m naturally a storyteller, but you’d be wrong. I learned to tell stories the first time I led a […]
The results of my Slack experiment
I got some interesting feedback yesterday about my #SoftwareManager slack room. It turns out it kinda sucks. Ouch. Not because it’s full of trolls, or because we post random HN stuff. In fact, the discussions are consistently high-value, interesting, helpful discussions. So, why does my slack channel suck, and yours probably does as well? Because […]
"Why is it taking so long?"
Customers, bosses, and clients don’t understand why software takes so long. After all, it just looks like typing, so how hard can it be? Houses, cars and other physical things benefit from obvious complexity and codified standards. Software development often has neither. For example, when I asked my home builder to add a small deck on my […]
What's your PR review goal?
I had a thought this morning: What’s your #1 goal of pull-request reviews? Pick only one: [ ] To catch bugs which could cause downtime [ ] To ensure your team adheres to best practices [ ] To improve code before it hits production [ ] To improve your team’s coding and […]