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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Benefits of Doing Remote Mob Programming in a High Stakes Environment

    A new team that needed to work remotely in a high-stakes environment decided to try out mob programming. It helped them to quickly go through forming-storming-norming-performing. With mobbing, the team learned new technologies, found solutions for dealing with others in stressful situations, and discovered how to work effectively together remotely.

  • A Collaborative Approach to Web Applications Accessibility

    Developers and designers can work together to share knowledge and experience when working on creating accessible applications. Accessibility issues can be treated as any other bug, something that needs to be solved first. Accessibility should be embraced as something very serious and important to society, and approached as a business opportunity.

  • Handling Conflicts by Dealing with Emotions

    Emotions are at the heart of conflicts, influencing their initiation, escalation and dynamics. Effectively managing your own emotions and understanding those of others can greatly impact the outcome of a conflict. Two steps to be taken are to label emotions, and take control and determine which emotion you want to focus on.

  • Navigating Open Source Integration through a DevOps Lens

    Taking a DevOps perspective on open source can help to incorporate an OSS project into your environment. DevOps engineers are comfortable with using third-party integrations, and they align with the open source mindset of breaking down barriers between different groups and promoting teamwork.

  • Embracing Complexity and Emergence in Organisations

    Focusing on the actual emerging organisation and the work people are doing can make a difference in embracing complexity and dealing with it a bit better. Psychological safety is critical for people giving feedback without fearing retribution or negative consequences. Fred Hebert spoke about embracing complexity at QCon New York 2023.

  • Cultivating Professional Relationships in Remote Teams

    Sumeet Moghe, author of The Async-First Playbook, recently wrote about building cohesive professional relationships in teams. Similarly, Laurie Barth, senior software engineer at Netflix, has written about the use of intentional communication in making remote teams effective. We report on a number of techniques that they have shared for cultivating professional cohesion in remote teams.

  • Building a Lifelong Technical Career in Software Development

    Technical experience matters because it adds to the value chain. In engineering companies, the technical knowledge accumulated by people over many years can provide the basis for the next generation of products and projects. Sven Reimers spoke about building a lifelong technical career in software development at QCon London 2023.

  • Approaches and Techniques to Break Down Silos: Learnings from QCon New York

    At QCon New York 2023, Emily Webber presented Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations, where she showed a worrying trend in the industry of specialisation and silos at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility, and valuable outcomes. She shared some approaches and techniques to break silos down to work together better.

  • A Culture of Continuous Experimentation: Learnings from QCon New York

    At QCon New York 2023, Sarah Aslanifar presented Building a Culture of Continuous Experimentation. She showed how fostering a culture of continuous experimentation and leveraging the principle of continuous learning can drive efficiency, eliminate waste, and improve product outcomes.

  • Embracing Complexity by Asking Questions, Listening, and Building a Shared Understanding

    When dealing with an environment that feels complex, people commonly look for ways to reduce variability and increase control for dealing with complexity. An alternative approach is to embrace complexity by acknowledging that it exists, asking questions and listening, and constructing a shared understanding based on different perspectives. This lets us improve how we adapt on an ongoing basis.

  • Debugging Difficult Conversations as a Pathway to Happy and Productive Teams

    Any time we talk to someone or to a group when there are high stakes and/or high emotions, difficult conversations can happen. If we ignore difficult conversations they typically don’t resolve themselves, in fact, they often get worse. Handling difficult conversations involves thinking about the logistics, having the proper mindset, and preparing yourselves.

  • Curiosity and Self-Awareness are Must-Haves for Handling Conflict

    When you're in a team, collaborating with others, it's crucial to embrace diverse opinions and dissent; you need to have good conflicts. Conflicts have bad reputations, but with curiosity you can harvest more positive outcomes and build trust and psychological safety. Self-awareness of your emotions and reactions can help prevent saying or doing something that you might regret later.

  • How Open-Source Maintainers Can Deal with Toxic Behavior

    Three toxic behaviors that open-source maintainers experience are entitlement, people venting their frustration, and outright attacks. Growing a thick skin and ignoring the behavior can lead to a negative spiral of angriness and sadness. Instead, we should call out the behavior and remind people that open source means collaboration and cooperation.

  • What Engineers and Companies Can Do to Increase Social Impact

    Engineers in the tech industry have the means for social impact through their network, skills, and experience. Companies can create impact by making business practices socially-minded. Inclusive training considers the circumstances and backgrounds of individuals, with minimum entry barriers to ensure broad participation, including ethnicity, gender, neurodiversity, and socio-economic background.

  • Leading in Hybrid and Remote Environments: Skills to Develop and Tools That Can Help

    Leading in hybrid and remote environments requires that managers develop new skills like coaching, facilitation, and being able to do difficult conversations remotely. With digital tools, we can include less dominant and more reflective people to get wider reflections from different brains and personalities. This can result in more diverse and inclusive working environments.

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