Curated Content May 2021

Articles

The Mortifying Ordeal of Pairing All Day

I had to confront a lot of my fears about myself, sometimes every day. I had to learn to show someone else all the things I didn’t know, my limitations as a human and a software engineer.

Simpler MachinesNat Bennett

An excellent article about the huge upside, and huge pain of pairing. We don't often think about the cost, but it can be extremely emotionally taxing. That said, done in a controlled way it can be extremely beneficial, and the article also touches on some of the deeper benefits. See the next article for how to better prevent some of the pain.

Taking Breaks in a Disciplined Way

I worked with a team where everyone was trying to do pair-programming, but it was too hard for them. I asked what made it so hard, and th...

Agile Otter BlogAgileotter

As mentioned above, this article is all about how you can pair and work together in a way that doesn't end with burnout, by taking breaks on a regular schedule as part of your pairing rhythm.

Staying on the path to high performing teams.

A friend is six months into supporting a sixty person engineering group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of their teams believe they have urgent hiring needs. It’s a great question, and captures a deeply challenging aspect of leading an organization: keeping the path after you’ve established a strateg…

Irrational Exuberance

An excellent heuristic for where your team may be, and how to ensure it's properly staffed, and able to work on the right things.

Shields Down

Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your current gig because you’ve been raving about it for a year, but would you like to

Rands in Repose5 years ago

Another classic that resurfaced in the last month. The moment you leave a company happens with plenty of notice for you and your reports. Walks through the different ways your shields may go down, and how you can keep your shields up across your organization.

Conference Talks

Getting Comfortable With Being Under Water

An interesting thought on teams, learning, and risk in organizations. Not what I expected going into the talk, having too much on your plate, but a great set of well illustrated lessons all the same.

Tweets

Daily standups are a shift-left opportunity. Take the valuable moments from a week's worth of standups. Ask yourself what forms of communication could have encouraged the same moments to happen sooner.
— Kent Beck (@KentBeck) April 27, 2021

Self contained. Short and sweet. Something for engineering leaders and teams to constantly think about.