Last week someone suggested that I should get a bigger table for work. I agreed. This week I ended up in the same spot:
Those damn habits! 🤣
I guess it's part of the creative process. But I feel excellent now after these two creative small-table sessions. My brain was dumped in the first session, and the dump got turned into a coherent storyline today. The RailsConf can come 🚀
If you are curious about giving presentations and talks, I'm basically creating my RailsConf in public. You'll find the latest progress gem in our podcast with bouwe.io
Cut the bullshallots
“You don’t have to implement the initial idea at all cost”. - Irina Nazarova on the Rails with Jason Podcast
You are the dev. You have some control. Discuss it. Drop it. Refine it. But make it better or less complex if you notice big bumps.
Once in a lifetime
I've had the honor to speak with two software engineers crafting software for 40+ years.
Pragmatic Programmer authors Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas were in da club. To be more specific, in da book club.
Here are some bits that I have on the top of my mind since then:
- Instead of TDD, consider doing prototype-driven development. Being comfortable in what you are doing is good, but getting out of the coding comfort zone might lead to new learnings and experiences.
- To introduce new good team habits, be a model first or a humble suggester second. When suggesting, think about the personal benefits of the individual developer.
- Developers are prone to collect negative emotions. Better to talk about frustrations early on to decompress and avoid bad endings.
- You don't join an incredible team, but build and grow with it.
- The two most important software engineering skills are Communication and Learning.
- Software projects are closer to having a garden than a construction site.
If you would like to hang out in da next book club, this is the next book:
Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
We'll talk about the first chapter on Tuesday, which is just 30 minutes of Audible or your reading time. Next week we'll tackle chapter 2. It's a non-technical book, but we'll see how to apply the Compound Effect to developers' content creation and programming practices. So drop by, even if you haven't done your homework 100%. It's just a casual hangout in the end ;))
Big kudos to Chuck for organizing this! And I'll see you all at da Compounding Effects book club starting Tuesday.
P.S.: Re: Bullshallots
If you are interested in legacy code, "Oh, shallots", conference talk jokes, and testing, here's a great talk by Jason Swett I recently watched to bump up my conference game: