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I am sure that you already have Zoom, Slack and Asana on your computer. But daily office life is more than written tasks and planned meetings. There are lunches with your team, spontaneous talks near the water cooler, common tasks and goals you want to acheive. It’s your comfortable workplace and it by itself motivates you to be productive. Just look at the bunch of stickers on the wall — big things are waiting for you!
Productivity in business is the continual effort of applying new methods and techniques. In simple words, productivity is getting quality work done quickly.
Developers with a strong understanding of company strategy rise faster, despite the misconception that engineers should only focus on technical details.
Many employers have been asking me what they should write to their employee's during this hard time. I have to had to create a sample template that can be customized by both the employer type and the situation at hand.
A curated list of my top ten VS Code extensions that will supercharge your productivity and make you more effective as a developer.
Declaring your first incident can be intimidating. Let’s look at some common fears, and work out how to address them.
The article showcases the top 10 AI tools that can transform the way you work and live by automating tasks and improving productivity.
How dogfooding has evolved from its humble origins as a marketing gimmick to a central part of tech companies' product strategy
Building and supporting software does not require you to be in the office every day. Companies like GitLab, Digital Ocean, CircleCI, InVision, and Stripe have realized that remote work gives them a recruiting and productivity advantage over the competition.
8 Google Chrome extensions nobody told you about ( but you needed them badly at work.
The barbell strategy is a valuable approach for companies looking to balance the need for innovation and stability in their software systems.
In a recent encounter with agile community, I was asked ‘what agile means to me’. Simple question but difficult to answer provided the nature of question being open ended. This certainly got me thinking. I started skimming through multiple ways I can answer this question. I had to revisit my past and reflect on different phases of my agile journey.
Historically, management consulting companies have relied primarily on human capital to solve complex business challenges of their clients.
Software engineers need to do code reviews in order to improve overall product quality and learn from each other. Code review process has a set of best practices like any other complex processes. Check best practices below. Do you follow them on your current project?
Every single day, people head to work with the desires that they will have the option to finish their day by day undertakings liberated from accidents or some other wellbeing dangers. Positively, we as a whole have the right to work in protected and clean conditions. And keeping in mind that most organizations take measures to guarantee the wellbeing of their representatives, accidents will undoubtedly occur. In any case, there are approaches to guarantee that such accidents are limited and unfit to show genuine sick impacts.
Here is a list of some of the best tech upgrades you should consider adding to your business this year.
How do you measure how well your engineering team is doing and how do you find the bottlenecks where you can improve things the most?
The complete guide to hacking the setup of your scrum team and start delivering business value in 48 hours.
Isolating features into different branches is a crucial practice for any serious developer. By separating each feature, bugfix or working experiment you will avoid a lot of problems and keep your development branches clean.
Mobile and web applications are worth investment as their use can help you achieve various goals, for instance, improve customer service, increase the conversion rate, provide security of sensitive data, automate manual, routine, and repetitive activities.
I was recently asked to engage in a debate over whether or not there are deadlines in agile. There were a few folks involved in the debate and the predominant perspective seemed to be that true agile efforts have no external deadlines - all deadlines are self-imposed by the team in the form of an iteration commitment or a scope negotiation with the Product Owner.
During my years as a coder, business analyst and technology consultant, I have heard many a manager or business owner complain about their on-staff developer. I have even sometimes heard them referred to as a “single point of failure.” At that moment, I know that I am entering a political minefield. My years of experience alert me to the fact that if someone in power thinks their developer is a single point of failure, then most likely the developer is not being properly managed.
New in office? Learn about the necessary skills required for effective teamwork, collaboration and develop interpersonal skills and excel in the workplace.
The next few months will be the most uncertain period business owners have faced. The coronavirus will change the economy and how we work. But I’ve been preparing for this time for more than a decade.
Excellent problem-solving skill is very essential for a Product Manager, because in the real day to day as a Product Manager will face a lot of complex problems that require deeply thinking for finding the root cause of problems, not only user’s problems but also internal problems such as slow development process, increase growth rate, increase retention rate, etc.
Productivity is a volatile thing in the office. It comes and goes. Just like there are ups and downs in life, some days are more rewarding than others at the workplace too. There will be times when your team would get in a slump and you will have to jumpstart them back to life.
We’ve put together a list of the best productivity studies to help you get the most out of your day.
Standard Operating Procedures are boring and the furthest thing from exciting but setting them up for your team will improve their performance significantly.
Reclaim is an intelligent calendar assistant that enables you to block adaptive time for anything you care about. Vote for us for HackerNoon's SOTY!
The worldwide lockdown following the coronavirus pandemic was truly a time for remote work to shine if there ever was one. With most of the globe’s workforce being stranded in their homes and away from the office, the only solution for most was to move their labor to the remote setting.
Many remote team management theories offer the following model structure. It starts with:
Fixed price or Time and Material? What is the best pricing model for software development services? Or maybe there is a third option to consider? Let’s dive into the pros and cons of popular pricing models for software development.
In this article, Taras Lazoriv, Advanced Software Engineer at Innovecs, shares his leadership experience and thoughts on growing an engineering team.
That technology is here to stay is an obvious duh. If and how well-prepared companies are to deal with the constant need to increase investments in technology, that’s not as simple. Another obvious axiom is that software engineers and developers are highly valuable resources. Weather having more or putting the ones you have to better use is the best approach, that is less obvious.
Product management is a specialized role with an intelligent blend of business, tech and user experience. A product manager is mostly tasked with the duty of successfully managing the development of a product from start to launch, above other tasks.
The Scrum Guide is quite clear on one important thing: for one product there is only one Product Owner and only one Product Backlog:
While the basic features of Zoom are more than enough for the average team, there are a bunch of extra resources and ways to improve your Zoom experience.
The capacity of a leader to envision, plan, direct, and get the most out of the resources at hand effectively is known as strategic leadership.
Tips to succeed at software Engineering Team Management
Hard-coded authorization leads to technical debt. Decouple your authorization decisions to be a more effective business.
Annie leads the business operations platform engineering group within Square’s platform & infrastructure organization. Prior to Square, she worked at a number of startups across a spectrum of industries from consumer products to enterprise solutions, as well as a wide variety of teams from sales to engineering. Having worked with many different managers, she’s formed her own leadership philosophies.
Over-reliance on Pulse surveys as the only practice for employee feedback and management accountability will hurt the organization. here are some alternatives.
Co-founder and engineering lead of a fast-growth tech company explains how he's built innovative tech with just a team of four.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a phenomenon in which unskilled individuals overestimate their abilities while skilled individuals may underestimate their abilitie
Engineering enablement cannot start with the tools and the process; great enablement must start with the engineers. And your engineers start with onboarding.
If you are responsible for your team’s CICD and DevOps tools, have you ever asked yourself if the tools you built are really making developers’ lives easier?
Remote working is becoming a more and more popular way for employees to work.
How can development productivity be measured? And should it be measured at all? This story explores some key ideas behind this controversial topic.
Suppose you have to add a new major feature to an app.
Agreements are an essential part of software development. They lower development costs and make developers' lives easier. But there is a problem..
As a product manager/owner of a product, a service or a feature, when do you get to know something went wrong?
You wouldn’t edit your own work for a critical business presentation, so why should developers be expected to test their own code? A second set of eyes is key,
Remote work is on everyone’s minds right now. If you are fortunate enough to still have a job right now chances are you are doing it remotely. And you’ve probably learned that you can do your job pretty well from home - just as well as you did in the office if not better. And why is that? It’s certainly not because of the added stress of a pandemic. Could it be because your management team actually trusts you to get it done?
Managing the scale needs of API teams is a difficult task. Here is how Platform Ops can help.
Knowing the business needs/problems can help engineers to grow faster. If you don’t know WHAT and WHY, you can’t think of HOW.
To prepare for brainstorming, it is necessary to gather a team, acquaint all the participants with the rules of brainstorming, and also prepare questions.
Planning means more than just “staying organized”
Having a remote team in the project will lower expenses and make hiring easier. It will lead to many operational challenges too. Let's see how to address them.
Learn how to manage technical debt in your codebase with this guide on the 4 types of tech debt, with examples. We'll look at how to fix each type of tech debt.
How to improve your communication skills as a software engineer and increase your effectivity
As a manager, without a system in place to measure yourself and actively monitor how you’re doing, you can't identify all the areas that you need to improve on.
In this post, you discover where platform engineering fits into your broader software delivery process.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is causing many companies to ask their employees to work from home. Apple, Twitter, and Facebook are some high-profile names that have closed their offices in an effort to protect their workers and curb the spread of the deadly disease.
Through teamwork and collaboration, you can make yourself replaceable. This ensures the project stays stable and has benefits for you and for the team.
I am sharing 10 practical ways to embrace mindfulness, focus on wellness, and maintain your mental well-being while in the office.
Discover how IT process automation help in improving business productivity.
12/8/2022: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!
While working from home has many benefits, it also has the potential for certain drawbacks. Burnout is a serious risk while working from home.
When many keen entrepreneurs start out on the path to growing their business, they are often guilty of making one huge mistake more than any other. Unfortunately, because this error is so ingrained in our very being, it’s not something that we recognize straight away, which means it happens over and over again.
Productivity at work can make all the difference when trying to achieve your goals. Readout 7 productivity tips that anyone can implement to improve performanc
Looking for ways to boost your team's performance? Consider three critical principles that will help maximize productivity and avoid burnout in the workplace.
In our previous blog post, we wrote about Agile, a philosophy for managing projects and teams. In that text, we mentioned Agile methods, one of them being Scrum.
For many leaders, recent progress can be difficult. It's not that we're not interested in performing at a high level and delivering the best results to our clients. Many of us ask ourselves:
Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described how teams move through stages known as forming, storming, norming, and performing, and adjourning.
Almost any organization experiences one of the main problems with the personnel policy - personnel discipline. It is particularly relevant for large companies. Here are several unpleasant consequences that this problem leads to. First of all, these are quite tangible hidden costs due to insufficient production of goods and services, foregone turnover, loss of important customers, and other losses from the irrational use of working time by employees. Let's say an employee takes 15-20 extra minutes every day to be late, protract a lunch break, have smoke breaks, go home early, and other things. Shouldn't be too hard to calculate that eventually it all takes an entire working day from one working month. In reality, people spend much more working time on personal needs: up to 35%.
I occasionally (and usually accidentally) find myself in a discussion about whether or not every story should be a shippable increment of work. Recently, I got involved (deliberately) in the discussion when I was invited to answer the question, “...should a user story correspond to a potentially shippable product increment?” on Quora.
Software engineers create all those great platforms and tools for every other industry, and yet, engineering leaders struggle to understand the work of their engineering teams. They struggle to correlate engineering output to business value.
A few ideas on how to maximise the real-world impact of your product work.
Find the best productivity apps for iPhone or iPad. These best iPhone productivity apps help you get more things done faster and more efficiently than before.
In this article, we’ll share our experience working without manual QAs and you can determine for yourself if it’s really worth it.
For the vast majority of people in tech, one of the side effects of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the switch to working remotely. If Twitter is anything to go by, for some, this may become a long-term reality, too.
The rise of flexible job roles, digital tech careers and more freelance opportunities around the world has led more people into working from the comfort of their home, especially during this Covid19 pandemic. However, in order to get the best and ensure quality service deliveries, remote workers need the right tools to assist their craft.
Code is a book and what the reader gets out of this book will depend on how the code is written.
A virtual human-centered environment personalized for the company’s culture and values is the future of remote team building.
Software development takes time and effort and requires patience, but if it’s taking too long it can hurt the business. That’s why it’s important to always consider what you can do to improve your software development productivity.
If you are looking for a tool to start managing technical debt this article will help you make the right decision.
Are you being the best leader you can be? Is your leader effective? here are some useful tips on how to do better.
A month ago saying that running a company through the crisis caused by this pandemic has been hard would be an understatement. I’m sure this has been unchartered territory for most of us. I mean, most workplaces don’t even have work from home policies that they had to design from scratch.
The benefits of mental health support programs are numerous. Some of these programs include free therapy and healthy eating and physical activity. Others provide financial assistance to employees who need it. Whatever the case, there are three main reasons why you should care about your employees' mental health. Read on for more information. Here are some examples of mental health benefits offered by companies. All three promote a healthy work environment. Having a positive company culture is one of the most important factors in preventing mental health problems.
Software and hardware teams rely on each other. If they can learn from each other then benefits will be felt throughout an entire organization.
Every business - and everyone - encounters problems, whether it's too few customers, a product now working, or a team not functioning as it should.
SaaS companies offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to providing essential software solutions to their customers. They have an added advantage of being easily accessible and that too on all kinds of devices. As a result, the modern age businesses are rapidly switching to these solutions provided by SaaS vendors.
Does your team have psychological safety? This may be a much more important question than you think. It may seem unintuitive but safety is a critical ingredient to unlocking your team's potential. Google certainly believes so, and Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School agrees.
Missing proper conversations and more direct collaboration, our team decided to do a “virtual coworking” experiment - working with our cameras on for a week.
When go on vacation or quit, you should ideally organize your work in a way that those who stay at work do not get lost in chaos. Here is a checklist for you
Invest in managing software engineering efficiency, not only measuring individuals' performances.
Best VS Code Plugins and JetBrains extensions for dev team. Boost developer productivity with GitLive, Tabnine, Stepsize, EditorConfig and Better Comments.
The transition from sales-led to product-led growth model: What are the benefits and challenges of the product-led growth model.
There is no doubt that the world's workforce is becoming more remote, particularly in tech as developers can now work from any location in the world. But there are a large number of new obstacles that come with this. The most pressing is security.
Sharing some fun times at a cool place to work for body, soul and sanity.
The three layers of software applications can help you visualise a software application's design and implementation as a non-developer.
Internal comms in tech can no longer be disregarded, regardless of whether you manage a small organization or employ non-desk workers worldwide.
Like many others, my workplace has been conducting business remotely most of the year.
It’s a fact that software developers are in great demand these days, to say the least… The growing need for building more tech products vs. well-trained resources is out of balance.
A flowchart is a tool that is used for analyzing, designing, or managing a problem by dividing it into various parts. Flowcharts are used today in almost every application of problem-solving and planning. The flowchart is such a versatile tool that every industry has been using flowcharts to elaborate their plans and problems for the past century.
Why do you really need a code review and how to do it right?
Over the span of a normal workday, a significant number of us perform activities in an assortment of fields that might put our wellbeing and welfare in danger. While our occupations may appear to be innocuous, the truth of the matter is that workplace injuries can and do happen anyplace. Hands on injuries bring about torment and enduring, just as overwhelming money related misfortunes for many individuals. Realizing the first means to take after a workplace injury is something each worker ought to know about. Shockingly, most specialists are ignorant not just of the dangers natural in their activity, yet additionally of their privileges to remuneration for any business related injuries they endure.
Customer Support is the team that keeps in touch with our clients. They deal with the requests and issues that connect our customers to the business — they are the bridge. Offering excellent customer support is as important as having a robust product. To lead this effort, Preply has recently hired a new Head of Support, Jean-Pascal Gribaudi. He used to manage a support team in Booking.com.
Don't think that working meetings are a waste of time. Organize the system of working with them effectively following these simple rules.
An average scrum squad that has 5 developers, at least 4 of them will be suffering from burnout. Burnout affects 83% of developers.
Improve your team's pull request management system to ship faster, more often.
Teams come in all sizes and these days from all parts of the world. Geography is no longer a limitation with messaging tools that can connect you with anyone in the world. The right communication tools can skyrocket your team’s productivity, as ability to easily share information and ideas with all your stakeholders is key to driving productivity.
With only 4% working full time on-site, more and more companies are moving forward with fully remote work models. Check out our tips below
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, millions of people have suddenly had to relocate their office to their own homes. In normal times, around 8 million Americans work from home, but in just a few days, that number has multiplied, and then multiplied again.
Learn how to containerize an entire Django project from the ground up, including a Postgres database, Redis cache server, Caddy, and Celery instances.
Discover how a team overcame challenges in a FormulaAI hackathon to build a 3D AR experience for sports analysis in this inspiring case study.
How to improve your focus - especially as a software developer. Book review of Deep Work by Cal Newport.
Red Flags That Show Your Project Needs a Test Plan and a Test Strategy
Practical leadership tips for a tech lead of a software engineering team.
Product managers are able to help in tech debt closing. Is it myth or reality? In the article, we'll discover what it may look like under the hood.
A collaborative work environment leads to a more engaged and high-performing workforce. According to a study, collaborative teams are five times higher performing than their non-collaborative counterparts as they feel more motivated to reach common team goals.
Cutting manpower overheads makes sense in a recession but it may come at the expense of talent retention and other important factors to a company's success.
In API product development, where the rubber meets the road, what obstacles do we meet along the way? Let's dive deep on how to succeed in API design-first.
In traditional roles the employees are accountable to a hierarchy of managers and those who have the power to make decisions from within the organization. Web3 turns this on its head and now projects within a more decentralized world are accountable to the community first, essentially reversing the power structure that employees would be familiar with.
Being caught in the ‘busy trap’ makes it harder to see that productivity is not based on the number of hours you put in; it’s the time spent creating value.
We hear the term ‘continuous testing’ a lot in the software testing industry. It’s one of those buzzwords that just keeps coming up, time and time again.
We want to work, live, and play in a way that isn’t going to cost us the planet and, where possible, can potentially restore nature to what it once was.
These are the best productivity tools that make your life a lot easier, as recommended by its everyday users.
Why does remote work succeed in some teams yet fails in others? We will attempt to answer this question by examining why remote teams fail to begin with.
Want to inspire and motivate your individual contributors? Try setting clear goals and expectations, providing ongoing feedback and support, encouraging career
Today's interview is with Marek Tihkan, CTO at Dashbird talking all about Dev team leadership and management.
As every child of the ‘80’s knows – the most effective way to become a karate expert is not through years of dedicated training, but rather by completing a sequence of seemingly tedious chores for an elderly Japanese neighbor. Thanks to the miracle of muscle memory, before you know it, you’ll have won the all-valley karate tournament. (Actually, now I think about it, this might have been one of the first, and most effective “hacks” I was ever exposed to).
Some discomfort is natural if you have recently moved from an individual contributor to a manager position.
We don’t deserve the team we can’t inspire. Camaraderie, purpose, and appreciation need to become our priority.
Google reportedly has allowed its employees to spend 20 percent of their paid work time to pursue personal projects that they think will most benefit the company. The objective of this program is to empower and inspire innovation in participating employees. Many of Google's notable advances have resulted in this manner, including the development of Google News, Google Maps, Gmail, and even Adsense.
The traditional workspace is gradually changing to a remote workspace. But what is driving the transformation of remote workspaces, technology or strategy?
Is there a place for emotions in the tech world?
Project reporting has never been easier. Trello is a website that will host your company’s day-to-day tasks. It’s a platform that provides project management.
Steve White | Working Together To Win Together
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Learn how to build a culture of code quality to improve maintainability, scalability, and efficiency, and stay ahead of the competition.
How to estimate work efforts that are not well-defined yet, but the business needs them.
How to apply UX design principles to develop supportive and efficient engineering cultures
When you have multiple developers working on the same code, you may face a lot of challenges when merging. That's where branches come in.
If you do a good job as a leader, the people you mentor will eventually outgrow their original roles. Some will rise within their departments; others will go on to lead new teams. Many will go on to work for other businesses.
Blind hiring is a process that aims to reduce hiring bias and improve company diversity, which leads to increased productivity and employee engagement. To help
Are you managing your projects and teams using Microsoft 365? Read on to find out how you can boost your team dynamics and achieve improved productivity!
Before the pandemic, roughly 30% of the part-time workforce was working remotely. It is estimated this will expand to at least 48% post-pandemic. Until the pandemic is over, it’s unclear exactly how much of the full-time workforce that can work remotely will continue to do so.
Let’s take a look at some benefits of team building activities and games at the workplace.
One-on-one meetings go wrong not because of lack of effort. They go wrong when you don’t pay attention to the little things that are needed to get them right.
Imposter syndrome is a feeling in software development. Not only does beginners or mid-level developers face this problem, but also the experienced coders.
Disclaimer: the author has no vested interest in the brands mentioned here.
COVID-19 made sure that even the staunchest opposition to remote working saw flames this year. It was a question of: Either you offer your team a chance to work from home or say goodbye to your small and medium enterprise.
A virtual human-centered environment personalized for the company’s culture and values is the future of remote team building.
Wonder how the leading mobile games companies test their apps' functionality and performance? Here are some of their insights!
A universally applicable yet straightforward to understand tool can help you make sense of task priority. When you are swamped with work, ask this tool.
Having too much Work in Process, also known as Work in Progress (WIP), is a remarkably common issue. In my experience, management often encourages this behavior. I don’t know if it is the notion that we will get more done if we work on more things simultaneously. Or perhaps there is a fear we won’t get enough things done unless we work on several of them at once.
People keep confusing agile with product development but they are different concepts. It’s important to make this distinction because it actually matters. It isn’t just semantics, the confusion is causing us all problems. Understanding this difference may fundamentally change the approach most organisations take to building digital products.
Today we are going to talk about eslint and webpack. This is not going to teach you how to install eslint in your project, I will assume that you already did.
Believe most of us are already aware of what is expected of a Product Manager profile in any internet company, starting from being a mini CEO of the product to be the interface between business, UX & technology. Here in addition to those common attributes of a PM profile I am going to point out few not so common traits but important qualities a Product Manager should possess.
It's becoming increasingly important to keep your team motivated without using a "carrot and stick" approach.
Nobody leaving comments on your code reviews? Try out these 3 tips on getting eye balls on your pull requests
I remember when Slack first came out. Me and my team of engineers were frustrated that the higher-ups were making us migrate away from IRC. Fast forward to 2020 and now I'm a member of 15 different workspaces.
Why team retreats are becoming essential when working remotely: TeamOut founder Thomas Mazimann
Today, I am going to cover why I consider data science as a team sport?
No strategy can help an organization thrive if the people in the organization aren’t resilient to change and chaos. Setbacks and challenging situations - a missed deadline, a lost deal, a failed project, a bad strategy - are everyday affairs at work, and only those who learn to get past them can grow professionally and personally.
The traditional work model, 9 to 5 in an office with the whole company face to face, is going the way of the dodo bird. For a number of businesses thriving in the 21st century, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
As organizations continue to embrace remote working, the need to keep teams collaborating becomes necessary. Unlike a traditional office where people can socialize, allocating assignments is done in-person, and brainstorming sessions happen in the conference room, these can only be done virtually in remote working. That is why video conferencing tools are important for any remote team. For your team to benefit from video conferencing, however, the video conferencing app of choice should have features such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, file sharing, and chat options among others. Here are the top 5 video conferencing apps that will help your team feel like they are working next to each other.
File management is a helpful tool in any business application. Here is an overview of the most functional, elegant, and popular JavaScript File Managers ready to be built into the client-server solution. Even if you do not have a direct need to work with files, you can borrow the classic file explorer interface for other tasks. For instance, there are some cases of the classic interface becoming the basis for a new web application in this article.
Technical Debts have been in the center of software engineers debate for quite some time. Not only its analogy to financial terms has been discussed, but also the different contexts and aspects a debt contains.
On managing remote teams and creating an atmosphere similar to your office: Recently, I did a webinar with TIE and fellow women founders on Managing remote teams. A lot of you asked for the extensive list of tools that I mentioned in the webinar. So, here it is!
Technical debt metrics help you to monitor deficiencies in your current codebase. We decided to look at how they work, and pick out the best tracking tools.
How does tech debt cost you? Here are 6 reasons why managing technical debt should be part of your business plan.
Some of the most toxic managers I have worked with had no clue they were contributing to a toxic work environment. Otherwise pleasant to talk to, these managers seemed to genuinely care about their people. However, what appeared on the outside was not in tune with what went inside their teams. Their good intentions didn’t always translate into the right action.
Vita Baryshnikova is a Head of HR at Skyeng where 90% of employees and contractors work remotely. Vita shares her experience of creating effective processes for remote teams. These simple tips can help you prevent burnout and add transparency to your work.
When your team is building a software product, the majority of the work that they do is invisible. As a manager, you have to rely on in-person cues for blocked work or frustrated engineers. When they move to a remote workflow—your team also becomes invisible, and all those critical signals are dropped.
In-person, you might notice:Recently, I had to deal with an old codebase that was difficult to maintain and scale. In this article, I'll share how my team and I decided to deal with maintenance and the best practices we implemented to reduce time spent on refactoring.
What happens if your development team is hit by a bus? A short explanation of the Bus Factor and how to hold its score at safe levels and why you should.
This is a short guide from the Head of Project Management at Techstack, detailing practical steps for managing your time effectively.
How can teams perform at their full potential?
Developers hate context-switching. A lot. This article looks at why they hate it so much and the main approaches to addressing this critical issue
Code reviews and the pull request are the basic building blocks in many software engineers’ life (The Workflow). They prevent bugs, mistakes, and help distribute the knowledge around a code base in small units of changes. They are, also — and specially code reviews — more an art than a science, and so everyone makes mistakes here. Things as random as the relationship that different contributors have between them, influence whether something is approved, overlooked, ignored or requests changes.
There are hundreds of things that could possibly go wrong when you start your own thing. It surely is in the startup stage right now, but there is a clear difference between it growing big and dying out after a year. That difference is - The Vision.
I wasn’t a big fan of managers in my decade long programming career. I took pride in my accomplishments as a developer, the individual contributor. After all, I was the one making things happen or part of the team that made things happen. We built features, fixed critical issues and in my view, only reason business existed was because developers worked hard.
Managing Guidance From The Diary of an Amateur (not anymore) CEO Who Runs a Six Million Revenue BusinessWhy invent the wheel when someone has already invented a bicycle? Whether in business or any other category, learning from others’ experiences increases your chances of success along with saving you time, resources, and money.
If teams are not disciplined about the process, or not technically mature enough to actually deliver the work committed to a sprint, scrum processes are bound to fail.
While product management enjoys unquestioned support in the world’s most successful tech companies, other organisations that could substantially benefit from product management are still yet to adopt and embrace the discipline. So, I want to go through why you need product management in your tech or digital organisation.
When Google Wave previewed at the 2009 I/O conference, it was a tool like no other. Not only was it the first unified workspace and collaboration platform before the remote-work boom happened, but it also tried to solve many of the same problems we’re facing today.
Agile, Flow, and a Filter
I've read many articles on procrastination and motivation, but I've always found in them a complete or partial misunderstanding of the problem. Or just inconsistency with my realities – after all, people are different. I'm going to describe what I know from my own experience and what helps me personally. Maybe it will help someone else.
I have always enjoyed healthy disagreements about my own ideas and opinions at home and at work. They give me a peek into so many unique perspectives and help me see how different the world is around us. I do not agree with everything people say, but I am definitely open to hearing them around.
This is the IKEA effect, a cognitive bias where we place a disproportionately high value on products that we have partially created.
When you’re collaborating with your team, you don’t care about files. You care about the people. So why do companies put so much effort into developing tools and systems when they should be designing for interactions and relationships?
The gap between how you view your behaviors and actions and how others perceive you is always huge.
Think about a normal day of work. You arrive at the office, take a coffee, start coding, do some code review, have lunch, some meetings, code again, and that’s it. But is it really?
How would I sum up 2021?
In a typical project meeting most attendees do not contribute but attend just to hear the conversation. A large amount of developer time is wasted. This drains resources from the project and can create a scheduling nightmare.
Considering today's cyber threat landscape, it is undeniable to say that the internet-facing applications are at major risk due to rapid increase in vulnerability exploits and ways to penetrate applications leveraging the hidden weaknesses in them.
My last job in Brazil before moving to the UK was at ThoughtWorks. While I didn’t agree with everything that they did there (OMG… Java, please no! ^_^’’’) there is one thing about ThoughtWorks that is incontestable: they are very good with processes.
Here’s my recommendation when it comes to books that will help a technical person to get into management and executive functions.
I loved being a software engineer, or so I thought. On my last project working as an engineer, I fondly recall spending my weekends writing code to finish any user stories in my queue. It got to the point that I completed my work so far in advance that I was running a few sprints ahead of my team. I started to use my newfound free time during the week to sit in as many application requirement gathering meetings as possible. I began to collaborate more with our design team and shadow interviews with customers about the product we were building. I shifted into more of a mentorship role for our engineering team. At times, I found myself explaining the rationale behind a feature design decision and bouncing ideas around for an architectural approach in the same conversation. It took me a while to reach this career-changing realization; I was more interested in shaping the product than building it.
From an epidemic, it was advancing towards becoming a pandemic. We heard a 10, then 20 and before we knew, it had already hit 1000!
Collaborative learning is an approach based on the teamwork of the employees' group to achieve a joint purpose. Such an approach allows one to learn from the experience of others, helps to generate more ideas, as well as establishes a solid rapport within a company.
You’re a manager and you want to add value. You want to help your team perform better and love their job at the same time. What can you do?
Become more productive as a developer in the next 10 minutes using researched backed tips and hacks.
After a year in people management roles, I discovered that people are the toughest part of it all. You can find perfect tools to automate your routine tasks or build fantastic processes causing you no trouble. You can get all other issues resolved, but the human factor will still be your biggest risk.
Notion is an All-In-One workspace. Notion’s platform allows you to create task-oriented lists and projects, wikis, databases, lightweight CRM’s, tables & more!
A robust DevOps team facilitates faster development of new products.
We’ve all had arguments about whether customers are going to want this feature or that. Maybe it’s about how the feature might work or even what colour a button might be. It’s an important debate to have, but all too often an important follow-up question is left out: how many customers will this really serve?
If you’re looking to be more productive in your life, you may have heard of the Pomodoro productivity hack or technique.
After a year that included 40% growth in user base and a 130% surge in demand for online whiteboard products, InVision has released an update with Freehand template gallery.
With 56% of workers only working remotely for the last year, working from home is still something most of us are adjusting to.
Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, the Pomodoro technique calls for using a timer to break down work into 25-minute intervals separated by short 5-minute breaks. After four sessions of work, the Pomodoro technique prescribes a longer 30-minute break.
Although WFH is now the new normal because of COVID, managing a remote startup presents unique challenges. As first-time founders of a fully-distributed team, this is the advice and playbook we wish we read when we started out on this journey.
The moment you become a part of the corporate world, the term you get most familiar with is 'Project'. We can say that projects are the elementary part of the corporate world.
The domain design approach to software development contributes to solving a specific domain model. It revolves around the business model, linking execution to key business principles.
How many times have you felt that it would have been better to contemplate the project requirements? How many times did you feel like including that “one” particular feature/function could have saved it from failure? Hold on to the thought right there! Do you think a System Requirements Specification could have played a pivotal role in success?
How The One Thing Philosophy can help you to concentrate on the right things, improve your focus and really get things done at the end of the day.
The software development market is gigantic and has a lot to offer us
Editor Config is an INI format based configuration system that let you establish project level coding standard; It allows configuring: indentation style, indentation size, line width and more. It helps in reducing the effort required to bring each team member to the consistent coding standards by automatically importing and applying the configuration to IDE.
Make feedback normal. Not a performance review. Delivering relevant feedback in the right manner is a top skill. Once mastered, it benefits the entire team.
The work of IT teams is done for the people who are paying to them, i.e. clients. Even if you are working on an internal product, everything has its customer and buyer.
We're used to thinking that you cannot deliver fast and maintain a healthy codebase. But does it really has to be a trade-off?
When global circumstances required our team to go completely remote, we knew things would be tough. Team members wouldn’t just be working from home; they’d be working from home during a time of intense fear and uncertainty, with a myriad of new concerns and distractions. We expected that engineering activity would decline as a result, and we were understanding — as our VP of Engineering, Ale Paredes, explained during a panel on working remotely through the crisis, “We're not trying to behave as if it's business as usual, because it's not business as usual.”
But when Ale checked the team’s productivity metrics in Velocity, our engineering analytics platform, she was surprised by what she found. After we made the switch to a distributed workflow, many engineers actually started working more. Still, despite logging more time in the codebase, they were getting less done. To find out why the team wasn’t making progress, Ale dug deeper into the data. Not only did she find answers, she used that information to develop better ways to support the team.In this article, you’ll learn what velocity means in the context of an agile/scrum methodology and how you can improve it to allow your team to move faster and
You might be thinking if maintenance is so important, then why do people neglect it? To answer your question, we have 12 reasons why people neglect maintenance.
When we talk about DevOps we mean the set of process automation practices in the software and IT departments. DevOps is a movement, or work philosophy, also defined as a culture of shared responsibility or systematic thinking, whose ultimate objective is none other than to work based on collaboration between members of the software development and IT / operations teams to achieve better and more agile results.
As all Spider-Man comic book fans know, with great power comes great responsibility, and being a great manager isn't just about being good at telling people what to do. It turns out that effective engineering managers aren't mind-bending wizards — they're just good at a few things. Here's a few of them:
Useful tips on how to properly manage a team, for first time managers as well as, managers working with a new company or organization.
Offshore outsourcing, in the broad, is continuing to grow – according to GSA, 70% of companies surveyed suggested that they would outsource more in 2020, with half of those suggesting a big increase in outsourcing.
Product team goals and structure transforms together with the entire business. Follow these transformations through every stage of the company’s growth.
Why Pair
How and When To Find Your Dream Team
A new employee’s career at your company can be determined, to a reasonable extent, by how well their onboarding goes.
The first time you finish a piece of software you've estimated, you discover a harsh reality ... software estimates are hard. Unexpected edge-cases, dependencies, meetings, and a thousand other things. This law summarizes it perfectly:
Every battle is won before it is fought. ~ Sun Tzu
Team building is not popular. One survey found 31% of workers dislike team-building activities. Perhaps many have been scarred by the forced fun of clumsy corporate team building events. But there’s real value there to be unlocked. How well a team communicates can be more important than how skilled its members are.
It is impossible for a trainee software developer to become a trustworthy professional in just one year. However, your first year in programming may bring you many valuable lessons and insights. What to expect if you are starting your way in programming? What tips does a novice developer hear from senior colleagues every day? That’s what we’ll talk about here.
Do time-saving apps like Canva help or hinder freelancers and digital creatives? Tell us what you think in a Tweet!
These little-known, scientifically proven customer retention strategies ALWAYS work.
It probably doesn't have an universal answer other than using case-by-case judgments
A Product Manager’s guide to surviving in a COVID-19 world
What’s the overall performance of your engineering team? Let’s look at how we can improve your team’s performance.
This article is for them, who have heard about Dynamic Programming and for them also, who have not heard but want to know about Dynamic Programming (or DP) . In this article, I will cover all those topics which can help you to work with DP .
Companies can run for many years without strategy sessions, and be fine. Yet if they start doing that – they will inevitably see greater success and growth and just overall business improvement. Albina Zhdanova, the COO of Tools for Brokers, shares their insights into organizing a productive strategy session.
Team productivity drives success to companies in all industries. The role of the team leader is to help the team achieve better results without a professional burning-out. How do you increase team productivity and keep a healthy atmosphere in the office?
Remote work has become the most transformative labor trend of our lifetime. Long before ‘social distancing’ became a household term, businesses chose to operate with remote teams because of its benefits.
Have you heard the news? Epic Games, the developer of a wildly successful multiplayer game Fortnite, has just announced a massive $1.78 billion funding round. Want to know what it has to do with collaboration software?
Amy Tom talks to Matt Groves, the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Couchbase, and Brant Burnett, the Systems Architect at CenterEdge Software.
React Native is a framework created by Facebook that is used for building native apps using React. It is mainly used for developing applications for Android, iOS, and Web. It an open-source framework. So, today we will be checking out the 13 most asked React Native questions.
Today, we are going to compare Slack and Discord - perhaps, most popular team communication platforms and figure out what is the difference between them and which one can better solve your daily business tasks. We will also share from our experience, which tool we find better suited to specific Upsilon’s needs.
Slack, Rocketbolt, and Trello are among the best business development tools in 2021. In this article, we'll go over 10 tools your business should consider.
What does it take to get your article rejected by Hackernoon? A behind-the-scenes thread where our editors share their thoughts about ill-fated star signs.
Why it is sometimes confusing to read about product management and why I wrote this guide: I actually wrote this guide in reaction to reading some other product management guides. I noticed that a lot of the guides I read were from pms at larger companies and didn’t actually have what I thought were the core pathways, skills, and experiences regarding product management. The guides did have a lot of tangential anecdotes, a lot of the typical hr-approved talking points of larger companies, and a lot of “check out this cool thing we did.” I tried to write this guide like something you’d hear after getting that Google pm drunk at a bar after the conference instead of hearing his talking points during the conference.
A development method to bring value quickly while not slowing down the pace of software releases.
This article takes a look at the different methods for product backlog prioritisation, such as Stack Ranking, The MoSCoW method, and more.
From the desk of a brilliant weirdo #1: If you’re having a hard time getting your team on the same page, I want to let you know that you’re not alone.
Unfortunately, very effective and efficient software engineers are generally very intolerant towards extreme ineffectiveness or inefficiencies, so try hard