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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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

When it comes to negotiating, there's an easy and instant way, where you just go for it and see what happens. In another sense, really, the easiest thing to do is nothing, and rely solely on outside forces and chance.   Or, you can take additional steps that will increase the likelihood of [...]

I'm often working with executives to come up with timelines and priorities, and I'm often working with older children to help them understand what I need to know in order to help them make a decision or complete something, and--I promise I'm not making a correlation between executives and children here--through this [...]

I have a canned response I have used for years when someone talks to me about a challenge they're having, and I'm in some sort of "position of power" relative to them in terms of some role I have (boss at work, director, organization president, mother, etc). "Are you venting, looking for advice, [...]

It's promotion and review season where I work, and going through this cycle I was reminded of a theme I frequently see come up: Focused effort vs broad involvement Sometimes we create situations for ourselves and our own growth when we are doing many things at once. Sometimes we feel like we have to, [...]

Once upon a time, there was a book. I didn’t realize I’d had it, or had taken a look. I’m not sure who wrote it, some was surely by me. And more parts I’d copied from others’ beliefs. Its pages were full of rules and expectations. I’d come to rely on it in [...]