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Because of my own personal reaction (usually shock and worry) every time I see a female engineering leader go through a reduction in scope, a non-promotion-releated role change, or an outright departure, and because of my own desire to make it easier to support each other with changes and growth, I shared this information with my organization recently when I made the decision to move from a Director of Engineering to a [...]

The real story here is spending time with the revered and adored Ms. Avery - my youngest son's third-grade teacher several years ago, who made a career change into software engineering a few years ago. She and Chris contacted me about speaking about my experiences in the industry and currently at GitHub, and I jumped at the chance! We had a great time discussing how I got started in tech, how I [...]

I remember my first office job. I don't remember my boss's name anymore, but I remember his face distinctly. I remember his loud, booming voice, especially when he was upset about something, which wasn't infrequent. I remember him slamming his office door which was across and diagonal from my cubicle, and then immediately opening it to storm outside, then coming back many minutes later smelling like smoke. I was a young girl, [...]

I love when I get to talk about my work, and recording this episode was such a great time. Check out Pausing Feature Development to Focus on Tech Debt and DX, and hear more about how GitHub made time to focus on engineering fundamentals.

Check out this LeadDev module, 5 investments for a sustainable, high-performing team, going live next week, 20 Sep 2022. Meet short term hiring goals or invest in building a sustainable, high-performing team? These are the questions that plague every hiring manager’s mind. Learn how to build a healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem within your team that produces high-performing results with these five guidelines. Come learn my well-worn strategies around how to focus on team performance, [...]

Before coding anything, make sure you've involved a decision maker, the person doing the work, someone with context, someone with fresh perspective, and whoever is going to be maintaining it. These are the five essential roles for planning a technical project. One person can cover all of these things with one exception: you can't have context and fresh perspective at the same time, so at a minimum you need two people involved. [...]