Good devs are hard to find. There just aren’t that many of them out there and you have to go through a lot of people to find them. Because this can be a very time consuming process, I’m always looking for ways to become more efficient in identifying gems in a sea of mediocrity. Standardized […]
I don’t like calling code bases legacy. The word “legacy” makes people think of Ivy League schools, vintage leather couches, and Dad’s old bottle of Scotch. It rarely elicits the kind of feeling of pain and despair one normally gets when dealing with old code. So instead, I prefer to call crusty old code Hostile. Dealing with […]
Devs often talk about the importance of documentation. More specifically, they usually complain about systems which have none (“How are we supposed to know what’s going on here?!“), some (“Well, I guess something is better than nothing, but come on!“), or lots (“Are you really expecting me to read all this?!“). I was once in […]
The hardest part of conducting a job interview is quickly figuring out whether there is someone great sitting in front of you. Doing that is especially difficult if the person does not make a good first impression. For that reason, I’m always afraid of missing out on the Classic Coke. I Don’t Get The Classic Coke […]
Most developers who don’t want to go into management think that their career path must lead them to become an “architect”. When pressed on what it means to be an architect, they usually describe the role of a technical leader: someone who sets the technical agenda, mentors others, tackles the most challenging issues, etc. While […]
A colleague recently mentioned to me an interesting psychological phenomenon called the Incubation Effect, which is an observation that people do better at problem solving if they put the problem aside for a while before coming back to it. This effect is certainly not counterintuitive. Many people, myself included, have experienced it. On more than one […]
Agile teams love little mnemonics and practices to help enforce the Ways of Agile. We like to put up physical Cards on the Wall to signify a piece of work. We like to ask the Three Questions (“What have I accomplished yesterday?, What will I commit to today?, What is my impediment?“) during Standups. We like to […]