Fog Creek software has been running a series of video interviews about software engineering. They cover hiring, firing, culture, and much more. Their most recent post with Kate Heddleston is particularly strong. Onboarding, from my experience, is a greatly underrated topic. It makes a huge impression on new staff, and a wrong move here can set the wrong tone for an extended period.
An archive from my earlier webinar hosted by InVision. I cover techniques on equipping your tech team for responsive web design and native design across mobile devices. The techniques are admittedly derived heavily from Agile methodology (daily standups, project self assignment) but I’m a true believer they can boost productivity across many team structures.
Andy Hunt, one of Agile Manifesto’s original authors, wrote a controversial post recently. He makes several arguments about Agile’s failings, and this one especially resonated with me:
Since agile methods conveniently provide some concrete practices to start with, new teams latch on to those, or part of those, and get stuck there.
I’ve seen this phenomenon firsthand. A team settles on a system as the solution to their productivity problems. They get bogged down in rules and convention, and integrate too quickly. The process stalls and dies. As Hunt argues, without flexibility, the company loses sight of their productivity goals.
Very solid design (with an unusual color palette) to a free 5-week email course. As author Jarrod Drysdale writes:
The Tiny Designer is a course about the big (monumental, even) design that we can make together. Non-designers will learn the important parts of design, so that you can understand what designers do, achieve your goals, and better communicate your ideas. Designers: learn to teach and guide others through your design process so they’ll better appreciate what you do.
I’ve written previously (and given a webinar) about team relationships and how important collaboration is. This course looks like it could share some helpful, related advice.
I’m giving a free webinar over at InVision a week from today (6/9) at 3pm EST. It’s all about building responsive teams, teams well equipped for responsive web design and native design on multiple, changing devices. No prerequisites – if you’re a designer, developer, project manager, or practically anyone working in or around a tech team, hopefully you’ll find something of interest. Just register in advance and you’ll be able to stream the video and audio live. (I expect an archive of the talk will be up later as well for those who can’t make it.)
Katie Kovalcin, writing for A List Apart:
When designers and developers (and entire web teams) work closely together with flexibility and shared understanding, they can use their time and resources more efficiently and creatively. Whether your process is waterfall or agile, a solid team foundation applies to everyone: it allows you to shape a solution that benefits all teammates on a project.
To avoid the mistakes we made on our Pizza Site process, we balanced our responsibilities differently with the Bike Site. We became what I call 80/20 practitioners, focusing 80 percent of our time on our own respective strengths while distributing the remaining 20 percent across other disciplines to benefit the entire project.
Designer Liam Campell, writing on Medium:
I don’t buy the story that you’ve either got a natural knack for design, or you’re totally hopeless. And yet I hear designers describe the programmers they work with as “design blind” with a slimy sense of pity; the insidious implication being that designers are not made, they are born — that some special children are ordained by the stars at birth into the sacred order of designers, and all others are doomed to brutish, unenlightened lives of “design blindness”.
What bullshit.
Michael Owens writes over at Medium about common patterns shared around hiring solid designers. The post gives a lot of feedback (from several different perspectives, many that are contradictory) on some of the most common evaluation methods, including design exercises, interview panels, and portfolio reviews.
Engineer Kelly Ellis reveals the real fallacy in relying on the “pipeline” argument (that there’s just not enough qualified women available) when it comes to the gender problems the larger tech industry has. As Ellis argues, there’s a larger problem of women leaving the industry early. They can often face a hostile, male-centric culture or dated stereotypes that programming inherently (and falsely) doesn’t match their gender’s “natural qualities.”
Wunderlist designer Timothy Achumba:
As designers it’s our responsibility to create an environment that encourages open communication with developers, as early as possible in the design process as to avoid problems like this. We need to let them into our world, help them understand what we’re trying to achieve and allow them help us to achieve it in the most efficient way. This constant stream of communication should continue right up to the launch of what you’re building. It keeps everyone involved aligned with the vision, it helps to form a strategy best for achieving the goal and creates a friendly, open and honest culture in the workplace.
Words to live by.