Understanding Our Core Values: An Exercise for Individuals and Teams
An exercise in exploring, identifying, expressing, and sharing our core values.| Colin Breck
Retaining technical talent has long been and remains a challenge. Here I talk from the perspective of a programmer about how to keep your best programmers.| DaedTech
An exercise in exploring, identifying, expressing, and sharing our core values.| Colin Breck
Dan Pink's Drive [http://www.danpink.com/books/drive/] is one of my favourite books. I also really like his RSA talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mG-hhWL_ug] on the same subject. Pink argues that people are happy, engaged, productive, and creative when they are intrinsically motivated, as| Colin Breck
Software developers stereotypically hate meetings. Personally, I do not dislike meetings. In fact, I quite enjoy interacting in meetings. What I dislike is when meetings disrupt my day, slicing it into small increments, such that I have no time for extended, focused work. I have tried to voice this concern| Colin Breck
A year ago, I accepted a team lead position. As I wrote at the time [https://blog.colinbreck.com/on-being-a-team-lead-welcome-to-our-team/], I have had a number of opportunities to be a team lead, but I have always declined them, choosing a more technical role, to become a better engineer. In this| Colin Breck
I would like to propose an experiment for improving the effectiveness of technical interviews: developing empathy for the candidate through a dedicated listening session. Previously, I shared my thoughts on incorporating code review in technical interviews [https://blog.colinbreck.com/interviews-for-programmers-should-involve-code-review/] as a means of developing empathy, to increase the| Colin Breck
I've had a few opportunities to be a team lead, but I've always declined these opportunities. Sometimes it was because I felt the project or the timing just wasn't quite right, but, as much as anything, it was because I wanted to keep developing my technical skills by doing the| Colin Breck
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…| Joel on Software
When you work in engineering or operations, you become intimately familiar with the challenges of technical debt. It can be difficult, however, to communicate the full cost of technical debt to others in the organization, particularly to people who are non-technical. Communicating the latent risks for software systems that are| Colin Breck
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.| DaedTech
