I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational design and how closely the two are related. I'm going to split this across a few articles »
Rust is fast. No, not the systems language - I'm talking about rust in the sense of losing skills in programming languages when you're no longer actively working in them. I've spent a bit of this week getting back up to speed with JavaScript. A couple of the teams I »
Data/object anti-symmetry broke me. The reason for this breakage was established a year or two ago. I had the fortune to work with some very smart people, who were very good at software engineering. As someone who'd had to fight for every slight increment toward clean coding, testability or »
What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as their goals, I'd say it isn't. Those examples are merely means to an end. They're often a part of transformation, but they're not »
I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual review I've had or given during my professional career has gone something like this: Here are a »
We broke something this week. Well, I broke something, if you go by code authorship. It was supposed to be a bug fix, and we did everything by the book - pair-programmed the fix, did a code review, got our testers to do some QA, even went through the don't-really-believe-in-it-but-pick-your-battles »