Are You a Stable or Volatile? 🔗
I've written before on this blog about the different personality traits of software engineers, and how different traits balance each other on a team. [...]
Matt Blodgett
Posts
Who Writes the Backlog? 🔗
The Product Owner has the final say in backlog prioritization. But who writes the backlog? Is it always the product owner? My experience with Agile ha [...]
Legacy Systems Age in Reverse 🔗
I feel like every job I've ever had in software there has been some old legacy system hanging around that everyone denigrated and perennially spoke ab [...]
Scrum Tensions: Code Review 🔗
There are tensions in Scrum anywhere you have intra-sprint cycles that must resolve by the end of the sprint. In my last post I wrote about manual qua [...]
Scrum Tensions: Manual QA 🔗
After working for many years in the software industry, almost always using a methodology resembling Scrum, there are certain tensions that I've come t [...]
Continuity of Leadership 🔗
There's a Kafkaesque situation that develops in companies that cannot retain senior employees. A team feels a sense of urgency about shipping software [...]
Daring to Care 🔗
The most effective technical leader I ever worked with had a track record for coming onto a project and whipping it into shape. His ideas were not gro [...]
Movin' Tickets 🔗
Recently I was re-reading Joel Spolsky's classic blog post The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. I hadn't read that post in many years. Although a l [...]
Vision 🔗
Vision is so important in software development. Without the engineers understanding the overall vision, they can't resolve ambiguity in their daily wo [...]
A Standup Free of Should, Probably, and Hopefully 🔗
It's interesting to listen to the word choices that people use in the daily standup. "I should be done with that today." "I'll probably be done with t [...]
How Many Spikes Is Too Many? 🔗
Spike is fun to say. Spike! For the unfamiliar, the spike is a concept from Agile methodologies that means a time-boxed backlog item where the end res [...]
Escaping the Bikeshed 🔗
I wrote in 2017 a post called Don't Trap Your Clients in the Bikeshed. That post was about avoiding the trap of seeking feedback on trivial decisions [...]
Make Your Thing Work Like the Thing Everyone Knows 🔗
Users build up expectations about how applications should work based on the applications they're already familiar with. If you're including a search b [...]
Tell Us Why We’re Doing This 🔗
I’m constantly shocked that business people don’t make much of an effort to communicate to engineers the impact of their work. It’s par for the course [...]
Slow Is a Superpower 🔗
Every company needs people who can work quickly. Stuff happens. Production goes down. We found a showstopper bug right before a big release. So-and-so [...]
The Experience to Say "I Don't Know" 🔗
One of the difficulties with managing a software project is simply getting people to be honest about the progress they're making and the difficulties [...]
Contextualizing the 1-on-1 🔗
It's pretty common for engineering managers to have regularly scheduled 1-on-1 meetings with their engineers. Topics often include things like goal se [...]
Clean Pull Requests 🔗
Pull requests can be a pain to review, but there are things submitters can do to make them easier to manage. I have some opinions about what makes a p [...]
Lunch & Learns 🔗
A lot of companies have a regular practice of "Lunch & Learns"—a series where engineers within the company give a presentation to their coworkers on s [...]
The Yin and Yang of Technical Personalities 🔗
Categorize this post as "advice to my younger self." As a developer early in my career I would get very annoyed when coworkers and people in managemen [...]
Let Unsustainable Things Fail 🔗
I read a post by Max Countryman recently titled Let It Fail (Hacker News discussion), where he talks about the importance of failure in software engin [...]
Tech's COVID Hangover 🔗
So many layoffs! I can't open Hacker News or LinkedIn without seeing constant stories about the next tech company to lay off hundreds or thousands of [...]
The AI Can't Destroy Anything Worth Preserving 🔗
The front page of Hacker News has been flooded lately with articles about ChatGPT, a seemingly magical AI tool that can generate realistic paragraphs [...]
Prototypes Live Forever 🔗
Code always lives longer than you want it to. So often as developers, we're writing code under the gun. Just get it working. We have a deadline. We'll [...]
RIP Fred Brooks 🔗
Fred Brooks passed away this month. I first wrote about him on this blog in April 2007, right after I had finished reading his seminal book on softwar [...]