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
Fall Prep Isn't Just For the Bees 🐝

Happy Friday,I don't know about the rest of you, but I do know I get that weird itch in Spring that I need to clean up and make everything feel fresh again. I also get the same feeling right now through early fall. Only it isn't to freshen things. It...

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Aug 30, 2024
How much does quality cost?

Happy Friday,When I work with leaders in most tech organizations, they almost all express a desire for their teams to go faster. The way they express this varies from small phrases interjected here and there to outright threatening people that they n...

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Aug 16, 2024