Feb 9Writing NCTs With Your Team Using The Miracle QuestionA Collaborative Goal Setting Exercise — I’ve recently become enamored by NCTs- which stands for Narrative, Commitments, Tasks. NCTs are billed as an alternative to other goal setting methodologies like OKRs. I’ve seen many organizations struggle to consistently implement OKRs and personally, I don’t find them inspiring. …Software Development4 min readSoftware Development4 min read
Feb 14, 2022A Goldilocks Approach to Reliability and Scalability ProjectsUsing “EBR@S” to invest that “just right” amount — Fast growing SAAS companies face some first class problems. Often as transactions and concurrent users accelerate, your application will struggle to maintain reliable service. Without scaling the infrastructure and software, the golden signals of SRE (Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation) are all going to head in the wrong direction. Pretty…Scalability7 min readScalability7 min read
Jan 31, 2022Creating Early Career Software Engineering Learning CohortsI want to tell you about an effective way to grow your early career software engineers while giving them support and community. But first, I want to tell you about how I got here- at the start, I didn’t have any early career software engineers to grow! A Super Senior Growth Machine When I started…Software Development6 min readSoftware Development6 min read
Jan 13, 2022How to be a Better Stakeholder20 questions to ask instead of “When’s it going to be done?” — In my last post “Slow Productivity for the Software Industry”, I suggested that reducing Projects In Progress is a great way to increase velocity and prevent burnout. In getting buy-in to do less at once, I wrote: Overtime hopefully you can train stakeholders to stop asking questions like “when will…Project Management3 min readProject Management3 min read
Published inBetter Programming·Jan 10, 2022Slow Productivity for the Software IndustryCan reducing the work volume improve software engineers’ productivity? — Last week I read a very interesting article from Cal Newport of the New Yorker:Software Engineering5 min readSoftware Engineering5 min read
Published inBetter Programming·Jan 2, 2022Holding Case Studies With Your Management TeamGetting your team of managers to solve their problems together — I often say that being a manager of a team can be a bit lonely sometimes. Sure you can and should share with your own manager but she isn’t doing the same job as you anymore is she? How do you decide how to deal with a uniquely stubborn employee…Software Development5 min readSoftware Development5 min read
