So the big craze right now is, “Tidying Up.” The show is based on watching people go through the, “KonMari,” process that Marie Kondo created. Over a year ago, I picked up a copy and read it. I loved its direct nature and it’s lightness at the same t...

It happens all too often that I’m working with teams that need to pick up a new set of tools while under delivery pressure. Often companies lean on phrases like, “We hired smart people,” as a way to excuse an absence of any support for the team to le...

One of the interviewing techniques I work on the most is something I call "Details and Options." I'm going to break down the basics here so that you can incorporate it into your own interview preparations. Why Another Interview Technique? I'm so gla...

At some point, you’ll get a message from an external recruiter. Maybe it’ll be clever and have some Star Wars reference because all technical folk love Star Wars apparently. It might also be full of misspellings and so off-mark that you wonder why th...

Ever been in a retrospective, and in the end, there was an action item that nobody followed through on? Or have you been in a meeting where everyone is lobbying for their idea with no end in sight? Or maybe you’ve been confronted with a puzzle and w...

In my last years of college, I took a lot of history classes, and I wound up loving them. So much so that I thought I should have pursued a minor. While this doesn't make me an expert, I learned some things that stick out to me, and there is one I'm...

I started pair-programming years ago, and it has become a huge part of how I code and work with others ever since. Yet, when I go to clients, the very thought of pair-programming or pairing up is met with lots of different objections. They range from...

I was in the middle of a discussion with some folks about estimation. Few topics create a ruckus on command as estimation does. That conversation led me to realize that there are many more ways to estimate than people often consider, and I thought I’...

A recurring theme for my clients is knowledge transfer from one group to another. With these transfers’ regularity, one might expect a certain level of expertise in these transitions, but more often than not, they are full of challenges and surprises...

Two well-known books where leadership and software intersect are The Phoenix Project and The Goal. These books are novelizations of a company that redeems itself by leveraging the Theory of Constraints. While The Phoenix Project is very much a take o...