“Our team used to go fast when it was small. Now we have ten times as many people and less work gets done. What happened?!” Short answer: Your workstream is controlled by people whose job it is to ship more features, and your software engineers think their job is to…

Of all the things you can do for your team, the one-on-one catchup is the most important. Bin all your other meetings, but keep these ones! In this article, I’ll cover why we do catchups, present a template for running your own catchups with some sample questions, and give some…

Talking with other leaders, I often find a confusion about what “diversity” in hiring means and why it’s worth caring about. This is my attempt to explain what I’ve learned. What does diversity mean, in this context? Diversity is sometimes used as a keyword for “equal numbers of women and men”, but that’s a very narrow definition…

You’ve been coding for a few years now. You feel competent at your preferred languages. You’re not making too many silly mistakes, and although you’re learning a bit every now and then from articles you read and teammates, you’re not feeling the passion for coding that you once did. The…

Junior Developer. Senior Engineer. It’s funny that we use these terms, usually reserved for age, to refer to the level of responsibility and pay given to a software developer. But clearly, age isn’t what we’re measuring. There are 24-year-olds who have packed in enough experience to be classified as “senior”…

You’ve been coding a couple of years, and in your first commercial job you’re introduced to automated tests. The experienced devs are saying they’re a crucial part of writing software. But you don’t see why you should use them. They’re time consuming to write, and hard to write well. …

Learning to code is a lifelong endeavour. Around every corner, you find more to learn that you didn’t know existed. I talk to a lot of compsci students, and many of them are under the impression that they learn to code at university, and then just go apply that knowledge…

In Wellington, New Zealand, the majority of developer salaries I’ve seen range from $50,000 to $140,000. It’s a huge range, and humans—also known as management—make the decision about how much they’re going to pay you solely based upon spending an hour or two with you. Salary isn’t the only thing…

Ask many people to explain what a great work culture looks like, and they’ll look at you as if to say “you know… a great culture!” And then they might talk about beers on a Friday, the coffee machine, or flexitime. I had the pleasure of helping grow a delivery…