This project was the best. Everything the company had done like this before ended up being a mess, full of stupid decisions, built by idiots. We weren’t going to make the same mistakes again; we knew better. We avoided the terrible legacy systems and built things better from scratch. We did things right the first time, avoiding the failures of previous, similar projects. We had a well-staffed team with a well-planned backlog. We would deliver something big and exciting that we know our cust...| Mike McQuaid
The first thing you need to accept is: your memory sucks. If you have tasks you want or need to do in life (for yourself or for others) chances are you can’t remember them all. That’s why organised people don’t rely on their own memory and instead have a system to track their commitments. In this post I’ll explain my system and why it is the way it is.| Mike McQuaid
I’ve been encouraged by a mentor to think about what my core (engineering) values are (in the context of being recently promoted to be a “staff engineer” and having my eyes on being a “principal engineer” one day). This felt like something that could be of wider interest so here we go:| Mike McQuaid
I became a father for the first time in 2017, took 3 months paternity leave alone with my eldest in 2018 (thanks to GitHub for 5 months paid paternity leave). I had another child two weeks ago so I’m on paternity leave (again) right now and expect to take more in 2020. This has given me time to reflect on how becoming a father has changed the way I do my paid (currently a “Senior Engineer” at GitHub) and unpaid (open source, currently primarily as the “Homebrew Project Leader”) work...| Mike McQuaid