June 30, 2022
You are going to make good decisions, and you are going to make bad ones. You will not always get it right, no one has a hundred percent success rate. But you need to make a decision. Not making a decision, and spending more and more time arguing about the pros and cons is not helping your team, it’s confusing them. Make a call, admit when it’s wrong, don’t flaunt it when it’s right, and move on.
June 29, 2022
You can either tackle a code performance when it happens (i.e., fight the fires) or you can create a plan to tackle it. You will never get away from fighting the fire approach, a scenario, a use case, will always pop up and make you stop and think – “huh, I never thought about that”. But you can look to the other 90% of scenarios that you know of and work through the scenarios that could be better now so that hopefully when those performance fires flare up with a customer, they are not as bad as they could have
June 28, 2022
You can go out and do things when the weather is bad. But you don’t want to do it all the time. Who wants to have a picnic day in and day out in the rain, each and every day. No one. Every now and again we’ll make an allowance for it so we can “brave the weather” and not “wimp out” – but doing this day in and day out is enough to have you wanting to stop doing the activity altogether. The same is true with our work, what activities are we doing that we can account for
June 25, 2022
But only if they are great. I love a good half-day meeting. If done right, it means business, it means direction and the measurement is simple. Were these 3 or 4 hours more valuable than a bunch of 1-hour meetings spread throughout the week? When done right, they should be. When done wrong, they will be seen as a waste of time that got you nowhere. The key to a great half-day session is to only invite those people that need to be there, smaller meetings can stand to waste time, and they can just schedule another small meeting in
June 24, 2022
“We’ve been delivering based on our fires over the past two months.” That’s what you hear when you are focused on customer issues, in triaging the immediate and getting the fixes out the door before asap, where the customers are beating down the door to get your code to work. And you’ve probably been successful at this, but you can only do it for so long, there are only so many times you can plan by the fire until they become little hacks, little pieces of debt that will turn into the next fire. This is why, after the fire,
