181–190 of 216 posts
I hired someone who is super detail focused and he's been amazing. He keeps meeting notes, tracks conversations, random suggestions and for funzies fixes my messy code.
I'd say this has had a huge impact on my own work, not necessarily for the larger team.
Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
Holy shit ! This is super interesting ! I'm in India and always wondered why this happens. Have you written more about it somewhere else ?
“For me, it was probably starting holding regular tech book review sessions.” How did you do these so people actually participated? My company is very deadline driven so people don’t really care about learning. Every attempt at regular learning meetings quickly died because people feel they don’t have time. Do you have a specific format? I have led regular meetings about coding style in another company. These went pr…
Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree. “What are you doing?” you ask. “Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.” “You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?” “Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.” “Well, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m…
developed a tool together with a colleague that ket anyone ask anonymous questions to the founders. We had the problem, that the founders wanted to get more people to ask questions in our all-hands meetings and me and my colleague thought it might be that a lot of people are afraid to ask them in front of a big crowd. So we created an easy to where anyone can submit questions anonymously and everyone can up and downv…
Designing more forgiving interfaces. I work in the public sector in India. Usually forms here are phrased in threatening terms - you can submit any document only once, and there is a threat of perjury for just uploading the wrong document etc. I proposed that we can utilise cheap cloud storage so that users can submit documents as many times as they want, and as long as any of the uploaded documents are correct, then…
IT in Indian Govt is stuck in 90s. Can't upload documents many times, unncessarily strict restrictions (like images uploaded have to be 120x120 and within 150 kb), the threats you mentioned AND the ABSOLUTE fetish with captcha and OTPs I hope the Indian govt sets up something similar to that design/tech agency set up by US/UK govts. In the meantime, a lot of props to you for designing interfaces that empathize with u…
Yes, it bothers me to no end seeing code that has been developed using 20 different mental models. I like the idea that enterprises (seemingly) are trying to scale by providing tools to individuals rather than trying to build up hierarchical structure within teams, but in my experience this has caused a radical redirection to having almost no cohesiveness in how code is constructed. "We use Spring Boot" is not a magic bullet.
Calling on quiet (but attentive) members of my team to speak up in meetings where we need to make a decision. There will be a pause in the conversation and (as if its my meeting) I'll say something like generic "Jim what do you think?" No matter what he says I acknowledge it and thank him. A few things happen. 1. It removes the internal conflict Jim was having if he should speak up or not. 2. It gives him 'the floor'…
1. Setting aside a "20% day" to develop infrastructure - I went through a slow period about 15 years ago where I had the option of doing this without meaningful tradeoffs and I built some software that I still use to this day. It's tempting to call this a learning, or reading day but I've found that I lose focus if I have a full day to do that - if you decide that you will spend 8 consecutive hours building a persona…
Setting aside your own time for learning and your own agenda is so crucial. The sad reality is that most orgs which run on a ticket/sprint process will make room for nothing outside of tickets. Looking back at my previous gig, the biggest mistake we consistently made (but were somehow impotent to correct), was assuming that all of the “we should”’s which came out of post-mortems or brainstorming sessions would someho…
Finally feels like we're actually getting somewhere!
Calling on quiet (but attentive) members of my team to speak up in meetings where we need to make a decision. There will be a pause in the conversation and (as if its my meeting) I'll say something like generic "Jim what do you think?" No matter what he says I acknowledge it and thank him. A few things happen. 1. It removes the internal conflict Jim was having if he should speak up or not. 2. It gives him 'the floor'…
how can you tell they're attentive?
I found a simple and light screencapture tool and I record my coding sessions into reasonably-sized videos.
Could you share the name of that tool?
https://github.com/potomak/screencapture (not mine)