9 multipliers for boosting your team’s productivity

Multipliers make or mar engineering organizations - teams that invest in boosting the right capabilities at the right time will get more done with less. Teams that neglect these capabilities will eventually get bogged down – they’ll get less done with more.

Leading through difficult times: Put on your oxygen mask first

The story of the most challenging stretch of my career so far and how I acquired years of leadership experience within months.

No Surprises: A framework for Software Quality

When most teams complain about poor quality, they usually mean reliability woes; however, quality spans a more extensive spectrum and can mean many things. If you complain about your software being of low quality, what dimension do you mean? Use the Maslow quality hierarchy to identify the pertinent challenges and make the right tradeoffs.

The SOAR technique: How to get buy-in and overcome friction

You have a tried and tested approach for solving a knotty problem; however, getting organizational buy-in feels like pulling teeth. You’ve tried cajoling, begging, storming, bargaining and more to no avail. Nothing seems to work; you’re frustrated and thinking of quitting.

From Chaos to Comfort: Transforming business output by eliminating pain

This post describes leading a team through a tough turbulent transition while handling hypergrowth and business pivots. It details the focus on high leverage activities to break the loop of never-ending toilsome tasks and reactive fires.

How to successfully ramp up remote teams

One of my most frustrating leadership experiences involved setting things aright after a near miss with a remote team

How to Accelerate Team Bonding with Tuckman’s 5 Stages of Group Development

A team will go through some rough patch before it jells. Watch out for it, expect it and plan towards making it smooth. Brace for impact.

How to rapidly onboard new teams: Part III

This post focuses on techniques and tactics for onboarding scenarios. These are the techniques I have seen over a decade of remote mentoring, being in teams and leading teams. Think of the suggestions as tailored heuristics for onboarding a new team based on the scenario.

How to rapidly onboard new teams: Part II

This post focuses on steps to take during the first 3 months of forming a new team. It is the second post in the "How to onboard teams" series which covers lessons and techniques acquired from ramping up many teams.

Lessons Learned from rapidly ramping up 3 teams in a year: Part I

How do you get a brand new team to become productive within three months? This post describes the lessons and techniques from rapidly ramping up these teams. These tips should help new members become productive within 12 weeks.

How to run better stand-ups

There is a high chance that you attend or have attended an inefficiently-run stand-up. I have seen various stand-up styles over the years. Sadly, most of the roughly 2000 stand-ups I attended were unproductive. Mildly put, most were status reports for some manager or higher up.

A simple framework for optimizing career decisions

This post describes a simple framework for evaluating career choices along three dimensions and helps you to choose what is most important to you.

Avoid bugs by understanding hole processing in JS arrays

Avoid hard to debug bugs and flaws by truly understanding how JavaScript handles holes in arrays.

Holey JavaScript Arrays

Do you know JavaScript arrays can have holes? How are empty slots different from undefined? And how do you differentiate between both? This article dives into sparse arrays and explains various ways to create them and associated gotchas with usage.

JavaScript Arrays Are Objects

JavaScript arrays show object-like behaviours in a variety of ways.

How well do you know JavaScript Arrays?

I decided to write about sparse and dense arrays several months ago. I thought it would be easy and imagined writing a masterpiece based off my multi-year experience with arrays. Alas, my foray into the intricacies of Arrays unearthed surprising discoveries and shattered my brittle expertise. This series of posts describes my learnings and Aha moments.

Taking on scary challenges

You have two choices when new challenges emerge: Offer several reasons why things wouldn't workSeek growth opportunities from the challenge Let's talk about the latter option. Scenario Your team dances through complex rituals every month before it can successfully deploy a big batch of changes. Engineers dread the drain on developer productivity and attendant customer … Continue reading Taking on scary challenges →

Doers, not Talkers

Excuses are easy, take ownership and drive for results

Simple is beautiful

Less can be more - remove, don't add: say less, delete code, write tersely. Find the smallest things with the highest impact. The end

What values do great leaders encourage?

I have had several managers across several teams and projects. This has exposed me to various management styles and taught me what to emulate and what to avoid. There are no silver bullets when it comes to leadership however these are a few things I appreciate.

Understanding JavaScript Array methods (2): slice

An idiomatic way to create shallow copies of arrays uses slice. This post dives into the slice method and describes a few more tips and tricks. At the end of this post you should know the output of [1,2,3].slice(-3,-1). Slice The full method signature is arr.slice(start, end). Start and end are optional parameters defaulting to 0 and arr.length respectively. … Continue reading Understanding JavaScript Array methods (2): slice →

Results over Actions

Are you working on the right problems? If no, then focus all your energies on identifying the right problem with the biggest impact.

Why JavaScript sorts wrongly

JavaScript sort algorithm gives surprising results. Read on to learn more.

Understanding JavaScript Array methods: Unshift and Shift

Shift and Unshift are the counterparts of Push and Pop. This post provides a deep dive into their applications.

JavaScript Array Deep Dive: Push and Pop

Push and Pop are two popular methods for handling arrays in JavaScript; this short post explores both array methods.