Learn how to be a wildly successful small business programmer

Tag: Career (Page 1 of 3)

How to get hired as a team lead

I see people make three huge mistakes when trying to transition from a developer position to a leadership position.

1 – being a “good” developer with lots of experience makes you qualified to run a project or a team. It’s just not true. Being a “good” developer with lots of experience is necessary, but not sufficient, to successfully make this transition.

2 – the idea that you actually know what a well-run, effective project actually looks like. Most people have never even seen a well-run, effective project. They have little idea of the results regularly achieved by the best teams.

3 – not adjusting your interview answers to reflect the kind of thinking and strategizing effective leader engage in to be successful.

In this post I’ll show you things from the employer’s perspective and help you get on the right track to get hired as a team lead.

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How to Crush it at the Start of Your New Developer Job

This no B.S. guide will tell you what you need to know to survive and thrive as a software developer at my workplace (or just about any workplace).

Congratulations on being hired. You have a lot to learn. It’s not the stuff you think. And you’ve got to learn it fast

We don’t care where you went to school, where you’ve worked, or about any of the things you’ve accomplished. That’s all in the past. You are starting from zero.

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Book Summary: “The Coaching Habit”

Stop me if this sounds like you. Somewhere along the way someone put you in charge of something at your job. Maybe you’re coaching a new hire, maybe you’re a technical lead on a small team, or maybe you’re running a whole project. Regardless of what you’re managing, you need to deal with people and that’s not going quite as well as you had hoped because managing programmers is hard. And it can be hard on your sanity.

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Maybe you even picked up a book or two about management in the hopes that you’d find something–some trick or skill–to help you manage your people better. I can tell you from experience that most of those books are crap. But there are a couple of exceptions and in this post I want to give you a summary of one of them: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever (paid link) by Michael Bungay Stanier.

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How I intend to become a better software developer

My survey of the computer science literature suggests there are only two economical ways to achieve extremely low defect rates (< 1 defect per KLOC). The first way is to follow the Personal Software Process (PSP), which was created by Watts S. Humphrey at CMU. The second way is to use languages and tools that make it difficult to introduce errors into your code in the first place and easier to detect errors if you do manage to get some into your code. In this post I’m going to briefly discuss these two options and how I plan to explore them to become a better software developer.

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