What happens when we apply a common Lean technique to software engineering process? In the age of agile & scrum, you don’t really hear about Lean, 6-Sigma, or other practices normally used in manufacturing, largely because software isn’t plagued by manufacturing’s dependency coupling and slow iteration. That doesn’t mean there…

Developer velocity is one of many metrics on a manager’s dashboard used to indicate the effectiveness of a team, plan, or environment. Many organizations fall into the trap of using Dev Velocity as a key performance indicator (or KPI) for team or individual performance evaluations. Dev Velocity by itself is…

Illuminate blind spots for your team and yourself The 360 review is a great methodology for getting honest, crucial feedback to your team, yourself, and your leadership. …

It Isn’t Brain Surgery, but Understanding the Brain Will Help! If you’re leading a team, you’re no stranger to the fact that change is inevitable. Your job is to dampen the waves that come from changes so your team so they can focus on the important tactical details of the…

Choosing the Right Motivation for the Situation If you’re like me and do a lot of influencing without authority, it’s crucial that you know and understand the 5 basic types of power and when you can/should apply them. …

A primer for managers, mentors, and senior developers As a senior person in a technical organization, people look to you for leadership and direction. Generally that comes in the form of a “one on one” meeting that happens regularly. One on ones (or 1:1s if you don’t have a lot…

A mental backstop for remembering the rules of Rust If you’re coming from a background in a compiled language like I did from Go, you’ll notice that some of the memory semantics of Rust are pretty similar. However, what’s happening under the hood in Rust is a bit different and…

I didn’t spend a lot of time on this one because I didn’t really have to 👍 Seriously though, Svelte is one of those frontend frameworks that makes building single page apps mad easy and I thoroughly enjoyed working with it — more so than React I dare say, mostly…

When a product or service has a feature set that differentiates itself from the competition, we call this a “delighter”. Over time, per the Kano model, things that were delighters gain mass adoption by competitors and customers come to expect these feature sets — ergo they are “must haves”.