Have you ever worked in a blame-focused culture? It's a toxic culture, to say the least. Searching for blame after a bug has shipped accomplishes little and promotes bad politics. A listener emailed me an article from Code As A Craft that talked about Blameless Postmortems. It's a great concept, and it accurately describes some of the better cultures I've worked in, though it has its downsides. In this episode, I deep dive into the various concepts.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Monday, September 3, 2018
Ep 65, Technical Professionals With Non Developer Backgrounds
Have you ever had to work with senior technical professional who didn't have a background as a developer? It can be a tricky relationship. In this show, I respond to a listener's email who'd recently been assigned to work with a solutions architect that didn't have a developer background.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Ep 64, Fighting Against Company Culture Is Often A Losing Battle
Have you ever worked at a shop where you loved the coding aspect, but hated the culture? Maybe they were too concerned with ship dates, or overly preoccupied with architecture, or spent too much time chasing frameworks. When we find ourselves in these predicaments, we often strive to change those parts we don't like, typically with poor results. In this episode, I dig into that phenomenon.
Monday, May 14, 2018
Ep 63, Where Does The User Fit In All This?
The user's place in the software development has changed a lot in the last ten years. Way back when, the user was a faceless entity that we tended to avoid. Today, thanks in no small part to the Agile movement, users and user representatives are often key stakeholders from the beginning of the SLDC. In this episode, I dig into how I think the user fits into today's software development process.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Bonus Ep 3, Reputation: A Cautionary Tale
Reputation. As programmers, we tend to hang most of our reputation on our coding abilities, if we even think about our reputations at all. As very technical people, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that reputation is for managers and other political game players. The truth is, however, that reputation is highly important, and ignoring that can have horrible consequences. In this episode, I give a cautionary tale of a programmer who didn't heed that lesson.
Monday, May 7, 2018
Ep 62, Gatekeeping and Shadow IT
Gatekeepers, those IT professionals who become so possessive of their systems that they become more of a hindrance than anything else. In this episode, I talk about gatekeepers in the context of software development and how they lead to shadow IT efforts.
Monday, April 23, 2018
Ep 61, The Art of Self Management
The ability to self-manage is one of those things that separates an average programmer from a senior developer, in my opinion. In this episode, I talk about the importance of being able to manage your own time and work and strategies for doing so.
Monday, April 16, 2018
Ep 60, People Skills vs Developer Skills
Software development is only partially a technical skill. As your career progresses, your people skills become as important. This is true even if you're never put into a leadership role of any kind. In this episode, I cover three tools I've used to help with my people skills game: Non-confrontational language, tactical empathy, and open-ended statements.
Monday, April 9, 2018
Ep 59, How I Moved Past Writing Code Professionally
Last week I talked about how I realized I no longer want to write code professionally. In this week's episode, I go into how I arrived at this point in my career and how tech turnover pushed me into thinking beyond just implementation.
Monday, April 2, 2018
Ep 58, I Don't Want To Write Code Anymore
The other day while sitting at my desk, I had a sudden realization: I don't want to write code professionally anymore. I still enjoy it as an intellectual challenge, but professionally I'm in a different place. In this episode, I dig into the topic and go over some honest truths I've realized recently.
Monday, March 26, 2018
Ep 57, Communication Skills for Developers, Part 2
A few episodes ago, I talked about the importance of communication skills for programmers. In this episode, I wanted to provide a real world follow up to a story I told in that episode in order to demonstrate how sideways things can go when we as software developers don't communicate well.
Monday, March 12, 2018
Ep 56, The Librarification Of Software Development
If you write software in the modern world, chances are that you rely on at least one or two external libraries. Depending on your specific style and type of programmer, you might rely on quite a few. In this episode, I talk about how so much of the industry is shifting to using libraries for things we used to write by hand, and the effects that shift is having.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Ep 55, Would I Do It All Over Again
When I first began my career as a programmer, the world of software development seemed like this endless realm of possibilities. Today, I feel like I'm in some sort of no-mans-land. I don't fit in with the under-30 crowd nor do I want to go into management.
In this context, I've found myself asking, "Knowing what I know now, would I do this all over again?" In this episode, I explore that topic.
Monday, February 26, 2018
Ep 54, Writing Code Vs Playing The Game
Have you ever wondered why it seems certain people in your organization have more success than you do, though you consider your work superior? In this episode, I talk about that very topic and how you can reframe the situation to better understand your organization's choices.
Monday, February 19, 2018
Ep 53, Communication Skills For Programmers
Communication in software development can be tricky. A miscommunication or misunderstanding can lead to hours or even days of wasted work. In this episode, I talk about my struggles with communication with users, managers, and other programmers, and hopefully lend some guidance for other programmers.
Monday, February 12, 2018
Ep 52, Career Motivation For Programmers
Career motivation for programmers can be difficult to maintain over the short-term, much less over a decades-long career. In this episode, I talk about the struggles I've had with career motivation, how what motivates me has changed for me over the years, and ways to keep up your motivation over time.
Monday, February 5, 2018
Ep 51, Confront Aspects You Normally Avoid
Every project has those aspects we'd rather avoid. Maybe it's front-end work, maybe it's database design, maybe it's writing tests. We avoid these things for reasons that are in my experience some version of "it's not fun". In this episode, I talk about why you should confront these aspects and improve your skills in those areas.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Ep 50, Working From Home and Remote Work
Our industry is one that has some interesting ideas about remote work and working from home. Few careers outside of software development get the opportunities for it that we do. I've done a fair bit of it myself, and in this episode, I talk about working from home and remote work.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Ep 49, Leadership and Junior Developers
We're all leaders to some degree. Even if your job title doesn't have words like "manager", "architect", or "senior", you're still every week presented with opportunities to display good or bad leadership traits. These traits can have an especially outsize effect on junior developers. In this episode, I go over the importance of honing your leadership skills.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Ep 48, Avoid Dogmatic Thinkers
If you haven't encountered a programmer who's dogmatic about some aspect of their work, you will. Dealing with these software developers can be very trying. In this episode, I explore the topic and give some pointers on how to identify and deal with them.
Monday, January 1, 2018
Ep 47, New Year's Career Assessment
About once a year I like to do a career self-assessment. In this episode, I talk about how I go about doing it, why I think they're important for programmers, and whether or not trying to plan out a career in such a fast-changing field even makes sense.
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