What are we going to do next? Lots of teams are asking this question every day. I've certainly been part of planning sessions of every shape and form. Be it just a quick check-in or a planning WEEK. They all had one thing in common: the plan rarely worked out.
Every day someone new decides that writing code will be the thing they'd like to do for a living. Or maybe just for fun. And thanks to incredible frameworks and Stack Overflow, getting your first results has become somewhat easy. This is great but has misled some people into thinking that building…
This would all be way easier if we would just throw everything away and build it ourselves.
You might have overheard people saying or said some of the following phrases yourself. "I work better on my own," "Pair programming just doesn't work for me," "Other people just don't think the same way I do." Usually, when I hear people say these things, we discuss whether we should spend more…
In the past months, I have learned something about myself. I learned that I value a good development process a lot. One thing, in particular, seems to spark the most discussions: when to make decisions. Some people also call this "When to converge". This topic needs some unpacking.
This article is loaded with my personal opinion on how to do things. The baseline I'm going to describe is derived from my personal experience. If you have a different view on some topics, please let me know. I'm not claiming that what I'm doing is perfect!
Over the years, I have seen companies and teams struggle with innovation. It might have worked initially, but after some time,e, the spark that existed when the company was young is now missing. As innovation is important, companies sometimes react with measures such as dedicated innovation teams.…
I've written about early integration and why it leads to better features. While this is true you might not want to roll out changes to all users at once. For instance, you might be working on a feature for a very specific target group and want to make sure that once you release it for everyone…
I'm transitioning out of my current job as Tech Lead at Signavio. One action item that came out of our last retrospective was that I should compile a list of my responsibilities. That does make sense, given that I won't be around come December. However, I don't have a list of recurring activities.…
Have you worked on a larger project? Maybe something that required you to work in more than one code base or more than one package? Then you might have already encountered situations in which you needed to take a problem apart into pieces. This is by no means an easy task. And that is what makes it…
It's a running joke at Signavio that the product I'm working on does not support undo and redo. And even though we built the tool with redux we're still struggling to get that functionality in. I'm not going to bore you with the details of why it's hard for us but over the years(!) I got an idea of…
Lately, I've come across a couple of blog posts like "Most Technical Debt Is Just Bullshit" and "Technical Debt Isn’t Real". They're discussing whether we twisted the initial definition of technical debt to mean anything and thus nothing. People have since then asked me about my opinion on the…
This post is brought to you by Jonathan Soifer. Well, at least without him I wouldn't be able to write it. Jonathan was my manager at Signavio and when I received the feedback that I sometimes come across as too aggressive he recommended reading the nonviolent communication (NVC) book. At first, it…
I've quit my current job and am going through the interview process for a couple of companies. Since I'm applying for a technical role I have to take the occasional technical interview. Having done a lot of these myself (as an interviewer) I was looking forward to how other people will do that.
I recently talked to another developer and mentioned that I use TDD. The other person then asked me whether I'm also one of that religious TDD followers? I had never thought about this. Do people think I'm preaching to them when I encourage them to use TDD? Are they only doing it to not hurt my…
Cohesion means you make sure that the parts that belong together are close to each other. 💥 Bam! Shortest blog post ever!
Here are two sentences that I sometimes hear from developers.
If I had to pick one skill that I believe can impress less experienced developers the most then I would go with my ability to figure out the root cause of a problem. At first, people thought that I would know all code in our codebase by heart and actually know what was going on. But my ability to…
End-to-end (E2E) tests are the tip of the test pyramid. They are supposedly the hardest to write and take the longest to run. But they are also valuable as they are the tests that "use" your app as your users do.
This is one of the most important lessons I try to teach less experienced developers. Next to making sure that your code works now, it's also essential to make sure that developers can fix defects in the future. The first step to achieving this is to write tests. Preferably, you are writing the…
During the last year I've become more involved in building the design system we use at Signavio. While doing so rolling out changes to the company turned out to be a major challenge. We had been doing it for some time but we somehow managed to get certain parts wrong all the time. Sometimes we…