Although we have employees in 7 countries — not bad for 20 people! — madewithlove is not a remote-first company. Yes, we work remotely, but there are 6 traits that allow us to be a successful remote company. We are a knowledge-first company. What is a knowledge-first company? A knowledge-first company is...
Just like any other agile team, we meet each day to discuss blockers and what we planned to work on. The goal of the meeting is to get everyone on the same page and make it clear when there is friction. We even tried async written standups. Then we cancelled...
Would you trust Ferris Bueller to work on your project? Probably not. But how could he earn your trust? When joining a new project, there are a couple of actions you can take in order to build up that trust. Here are some tips. 1. Commit and Disagree We’ve...
No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy In a continued push for asynchronous work, we attempted to tackle one of the last major meetings we had — Sprint Planning. I’ve found this to be the most dreaded meeting for developers since it’s often a time sink. With...
As engineers, we want to focus on delivering value to customers. We noticed that a lot of the projects we work on are following agile processes, but in a format that misses the mark. That’s why we started experimenting with how we could bring back the right focus. I’...
Some time ago I came across this article on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge blog about when founding CEOs need to go. It’s from 2005, but it is still just as relevant now. The main takeaway is that you need differently skilled people at the helm in different...
I hate Mondays. The theory is that if you hate Mondays you should change your job. And if you do that but find yourself hating your job again recently after joining a new company, well then it’s time for a new career. I got tripped up during a job...
I’m new to pair programming. While the concept of pair programming is certainly not new to me (see among many, “The Clean Coder” by Robert C. Martin), I admit I previously did not have many opportunities to actually pair. It was either foreign to others or they just “didn’...
Some weeks ago, I was doing a talk about how you can make pair programming effective and enjoyable. Everything went well until I got a question which I couldn’t directly answer. The questioner had some experience with pair programming and asked me how you can avoid getting frustrated when...