It's the start of the sprint or milestone and everyone has come up with plenty of things to work on. The task list is long and as usual, resources are limited. So what we do? Let's have a meeting to prioritize all the work items! I've attended my fair share of these meetings and they typically take one of two approaches: Buckets A very common strategy I see used is to … [Read more...] about Prioritization: Rank, don’t bucket
Improving skills
Software Engineer Skills: Four Growth Areas
Being an effective software engineer requires a mix of different skills. In this article, I provide a framework for how to think about your skillset and guidelines for how to improve in each area. At a high level, a software engineer needs to leverage four core types of skills: I strongly believe that the impact of these core skills is multiplicative rather than additive. … [Read more...] about Software Engineer Skills: Four Growth Areas
Protecting your time 3: writing
To wrap up the series on protecting your time (see Part 1: coding and Part 2: focus), I want to briefly talk about writing. Putting information in written form and making it widely available is a great time saver. It removes the burden of having to communicate things 1:1 over and over. Write more As you design systems and write code, you start accumulating some specific … [Read more...] about Protecting your time 3: writing
Protecting your time 2: Focus
This is the second part of the series on making the most out of your time. The first part (Coding) focused on how to write your code to protect your future time. Today we focus on the present, meaning how to efficiently use the time you have now. You are a software engineer, right? This means you should spend most of your time writing code. But it's not uncommon to go … [Read more...] about Protecting your time 2: Focus
Asking technical questions
Asking technical questions is a key element of writing software. And today this is very often done by writing in some form of public forum. It can be an internal email group at your company, a public community such as stack overflow or GitHub, or even a private email to a colleague. Whatever the medium is, how you write the question can make a big difference in how quickly you … [Read more...] about Asking technical questions