The Purpose of Standups There are a few reasons to hold a standup meeting and/or chat thread: To report up the chain of command (ie: dev to managers). To communicate across the whole team (ie: dev to devs). The Standup Thread Posting in a thread like this should be required. Especially if you work fully … Continue reading My Opinion on Daily Standups →

TL;DR Devs should "go rogue" often and not feel bad about it. What does "going rogue" mean? Going rogue means you are working on something not tracked by Jira in the current sprint. Isn’t going rogue bad? It depends. It’s bad if you’re missing deadlines or slacking off. It’s good if you’re improving the DevEx, … Continue reading Going Rogue 😈 →

Why am I writing about this? I recently read this insightful blog post by Jean Hsu titled “Ask vs Guess Culture” which usefully divides communication styles into two cultures called “Ask Culture“ and “Guess Culture“. Working on a team that is fully remote, international, multi-cultural, and includes people from different companies (employees, contractors from company … Continue reading Ask vs Guess Culture →

Why Demo? Because: Demos spread siloed knowledge. Demos boost team morale. Showing improvements to our app, user experience, developer experience, etc helps us feel like we’re making progress. The lack thereof can fill our minds with doubt about the work we’re doing. Demos demonstrate your ability to add value as a developer. Silently shipping bug … Continue reading Demo-nomics 101 →

The Scenario If you are a software engineer, then the following scenario inevitably happens to you: Your friend (or relative, neighbor, acquaintance, etc) learns you are a software engineer. She tells you about her big idea: a SAAS business that does X, Y, and Z. You talk for a while about the potential of this … Continue reading So, your friend has a startup idea, huh? →

#1 My New Rubber Ducky ChatGPT is my new and improved version of the programmer's iconic rubber duck. I talk through things with ChatGPT and it gives me its opinions – which are often very helpful. My ChatGPT rubber ducky helps me: Test my assumptions Debug and understand errors Discuss high-level architectural pros and cons … Continue reading How I Use ChatGPT as a Software Engineer →

Be a What? A Big-Picture Developer is a dev who understands the vision of the product they are building. They know the context of the feature they are working on and how it fits into the product as a whole. They put themselves in the shoes of the user and ensure the user experience is … Continue reading Be a “Big-Picture Developer” →

TL;DR Don’t hoard knowledge. If you know something that would benefit others then share it freely and make it accessible. Sharing is caring. Why you hating on Tribal Knowledge, Kev? “Knowledge is power“ Francis Bacon I agree, Francis, but when your siloed knowledge turns into a bottleneck for your coworkers that ain’t cool. I’m wary … Continue reading Tribal Knowledge = 💩 →

TL;DR Through my conversation with OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, I was able to create a simple "Rock Paper Scissors" game with basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The code I used was taken exclusively from ChatGPT's answers to my questions/prompts. The game itself is not that impressive. The means in which I created the game is the … Continue reading AI Created This Game →

The Goal The goal is to deliver software that is valuable, usable, and maintainable. "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand" -Martin Fowler A codebase usually starts out as something simple and elegant. But over time, with added use-cases, requirements, deprecations, etc. the code … Continue reading “Clean Code”: High-level Principles →