Teamwork

How do you prioritize?

How do you choose what to work on first? As an empowered engineer that's a key skill.

Coaching AI to write your code

Working with AI is here and it's skill. Just like google-fu became important in the mid 2000's. A few things I've learned.

Why learning and teaching the good stuff is hard

You can't learn to ride a bike from reading a book.

The swarm doc

Here's a doc I like to use to structure the pre-work design chat that makes later code review a breeze.

"Yes caviar is great, here's a ham sandwich"

Why do some projects ship and others seem to drag on forever? You need 3 people to get this right.

Make mistakes easy to fix

You can't prevent bugs. You'll burn out. Instead focus on making them quick to fix.

How big up-front design fails

A long design phase without shipping kills many software projects. Here's a story from production I haven't shared before.

What helps you ship confidently?

Been thinking about what needs to be in place for engineers to ship with confidence

Get us over the water, not build us a bridge

effective engineering teams should work *with* their product owner/manager, not *for* them

Coordinating at the end is too late

When working: sync first *then* async

Approve with comment

A shift in your code review process can boost your team's productivity. Empower authors to make the call.

Code yourself out of the job

Don't get stuck being a critical member of the team.

The quickest way to kill a team

The answer to 5 soloists in a trench coat

Team dysfunction where everyone's a soloist? Try this fix: Force the team to work on ONE story at a time.

5 soloists in a trench coat

Ever felt like your software team is just soloists in a trench coat? You may be right!

Effective standups

The secret to effective standups that don't suck