Did you know that Skunk Works has a set of rules laid down by its founder? If you aren’t familiar with Skunk Works, it’s a division of Lockheed Martin focusing on rapid completion of impossible projects, moonshots. The founder, Kelly Johnson, has recorded the axioms. Here’s what...
Recruitment was not the easiest business to work in during the first year of the pandemic. The first things that come to mind when thinking about how COVID-19 affected the economy are massive layoffs in various economic sectors, small businesses closing down, and a lot of uncertainty in general. A...
I’ve very recently passed a personal milestone in my career. I facilitated my first ever event storm. As with most things you haven’t done before, doing them the first time is a good opportunity to learn. In preparation, I was reading as much as I could on event...
We see teams blindly following Scrum, Kanban, or the Spotify model and introducing roles into teams (such as a Site Reliability Engineer) because other companies blogged about it. These models and roles are created because of specific struggles these companies faced. While all these processes thus contain valid solutions to...
1. Is roadmapping useful in software development? Suppose you are a mayor of Smallville. You might create a roadmap for the city that covers the various endeavors to be undertaken this year. An item on the list is “Expand Main Street” since citizens keep demanding that their commute time be...
I saw an interesting heuristic regarding habits recently but I couldn’t find the source anymore. Bear with me while I paraphrase a bit. If you want to build a habit, never skip it twice. Skipping your workout once is okay, we’re all human, we all have changing priorities...
These are strange times for everyone. Imagine starting out in a new remote job when all you’ve ever been used to is going to an office and seeing all your colleagues face-to-face every single day. A new job: exciting! Meeting all your colleagues only through a screen: scary? It...
Why would you want your engineers to become leaders? Managing a team of just a few engineers and their output should be easy. You can go deep into the details of solutions and still keep a good high-level overview of everything that’s happening now and should happen in the...
As a non-technical founder, it can be difficult to determine if your development team is composed of engineers that are on a staff engineer, senior or junior level, or somewhere in between. This especially becomes a big challenge when it’s time to hire your first engineer or expand the...