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…
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.
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'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.…
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…
Here are two sentences that I sometimes hear from developers.