Safety matters more than ever

Happy Friday,As we enter the holiday season, plenty of news stories indicate that many people will experience stress, fear, and outrage. In case you haven't been keeping up with the news, and I don't blame you, the CEO of UnitedHealth was shot to dea...

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Dec 06, 2024
2024 is almost over and Sprint Goals are still weird.

Happy Friday!Back in 2011 the world's most popular agile framework, Scrum, changed. You see prior to that, every time the team planned a sprint they were told they had to commit to completing everything they planned. After 2011, the team was asked to...

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Nov 22, 2024
A set of tools for better meetings 🧙‍♂️

Happy Friday,I'm going to keep this email pretty short and sweet.I hate crappy meetings, and way too many meetings are, in fact, crappy.Lots of people don't know why they're meeting, the meeting lacks a useful structure, people are disengaged, and th...

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Nov 08, 2024
I just wrapped up an engagement, or did I?

Happy Friday,This email is a bit different than others in that I'm going to share a bit about an engagement that recently wrapped up. I think it's interesting, and it shows a bit about how I work with clients in a way that is different than most othe...

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Nov 01, 2024
The Clean House Fallacy

Happy Friday!I was thinking the other day about some conversations I've had with former clients and at various jobs, and in my mind, they kept coming back to a single point. There was one behavior that was natural to me that I was encouraging them to...

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Oct 25, 2024
Pushing for speed is almost always a bad idea. Almost.

Happy Friday,I was thinking about a client of mine that is remarkable and abnormal. Something really unique about them is that they are an exception to something I almost always get on a soapbox about.That is, you don't need to sacrifice quality for...

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Oct 11, 2024
The shape of tests ✅

Happy Friday,Today's email is going to get a bit technical. You see, one of the things I wind up teaching teams as they go from good to great is how to test their code better. It turns out that most developers have spent a fraction of energy learning...

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Oct 04, 2024
What is your legacy?

Happy Friday!For those of you who don't know, before I became a consultant, I was a job hopper. The longest I spent at any job was two years, and I'd say excluding those two times, my average time at a company was around 8-10 months.My reasons for m...

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Sep 20, 2024
Local optimizations are great!

Happy Friday!Last night my wife and I went to a concert and while we were walking from our car to the venue we saw a special VIP parking area guarded by a teen. The teen was sitting on a stool behind a large orange cone, and a few feet away another l...

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Sep 06, 2024