Productivity Over Process
It seems like every software company you talk to will boast about how they use the latest development process du jour—Agile, Lean, XP, Kanban—pick your poison. What’s interesting is that the people...
View ArticleDiscipline in Prototyping
Writing software doesn’t require discipline, but writing good software does. I would argue that the vast majority of tech debt in projects results from PoCs/prototypes/spikes. The code from these...
View ArticleNo More Ninjas
How does a software company attract talent? Compensation? That’s how they attract people. Free lunches and foosball tables? Keep guessing. The most effective way for a company to bag top-tier engineers...
View ArticleProduct Development is a Trust Fall
A couple weeks ago, Marty Cagan gave an outstanding talk at CraftConf on why products fail despite having great engineering teams. In it, he calls out many of the common mistakes made by teams, and I...
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Shit Rolls Downhill
Building software of significant complexity is tough because a lot of pieces have to come together and a lot of teams have to work in concert to be successful. It can be extraordinarily difficult to...
View ArticleDecision Impact
I think a critical part of building an empathetic engineering culture is understanding decision impact. This is a blindspot that I see happening a lot: a deliberate effort to understand the effects...
View ArticlePain-Driven Development: Why Greedy Algorithms Are Bad for Engineering Orgs
I recently wrote about the importance of understanding decision impact and why it’s important for building an empathetic engineering culture. I presented the distinction between pain displacement and...
View ArticleThe Future of Ops
Traditional Operations isn’t going away, it’s just retooling. The move from on-premise to cloud means Ops, in the classical sense, is largely being outsourced to cloud providers. This is the...
View ArticleMore Environments Will Not Make Things Easier
Microservices are hard. They require extreme discipline. They require a lot more upfront thinking. They introduce integration challenges and complexity that you otherwise wouldn’t have with a monolith,...
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Scaling DevOps and the Revival of Operations
Operations is going through a renaissance right now. With the move to cloud, the increasing amount of automation, and the increasing importance of automation, Ops as we know it is reinventing itself...
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We suck at meetings
I’ve worked as a software engineer, manager, consultant, and business owner. All of these jobs have involved meetings. What those meetings look like has varied greatly. As an engineer, meetings...
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Meeting notes lose value the moment you finish writing them—and it’s time to...
I like to be prepared in meetings. In some ways it’s probably an innate part of my personality, but it also became more important to me as my role has changed throughout my career. In particular, the...
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