by David VanEpps | Blog, The Engineer
“Are you kidding me? Do you mean to tell me that this change is going to take three weeks? Think long and hard before you answer that!” That exclamation was, in fact, followed by an awkward silence. In the next few seconds, I thought… This isn’t what I signed...
by Alan Willett | Executive Leadership, The Dev Team, The Engineer
Pat, a director of a team of software developers, cried out with dismay. “What do you mean that technical debt is strangling me more than I know?” Pat had already laid out all the reasons technical debt was a bane to the entire organization’s existence. Here is Pat’s...
by Alan Willett | Executive Leadership, The Engineer, The Enterprise
“This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.” ALICE WATERS I have observed many all-hands meetings. The mediocre sessions address a distracted audience. The worst ones have an...
by Alan Willett | The Engineer
“I also believe that it may happen that one succeeds, and one mustn’t begin by despairing; even if one loses here and there, and even if one sometimes feels a sort of decline, the point is nevertheless to revive and have courage, even though things don’t turn out as...
by Alan Willett | The Dev Team, The Engineer
“You’ll find I’m full of surprises.“ Luke Skywalker Despite how much we complain, there is a joy to working on urgent items. They give us a ready excuse for not working on the hard things. We might shout, “Oh, I can’t work on the crucial long-term work. This crisis...
by Alan Willett | The Dev Team, The Engineer
“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.” Joe Abercrombie About 23 years ago, I did a course in software development where I tracked every mistake I made. It was shocking and disheartening. I made...
