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Trivago’s Journey from PHP+Melody to Next.js and Typescript
Trivago’s platform was built using PHP and their Melody framework. A small number of engineers at Trivago maintained Melody, which was a continuity risk. Melody’s documentation and examples could not be as rich as desired due to a lack of capacity, making engineer onboarding and support much more difficult. Trivago then decided to rewrite its platform on Typescript using Next.js.
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How Getting Feedback from Angry Users Helps to Develop Better Products
Every time you change something in your product, angry users can show up. These users are engaged and they care about your product. Listening to them can help you find golden nuggets of user insight to improve your product.
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The Path to a Staff-Plus Engineer Role: from Management Back to Tech
When working in tech, a managerial career may not be for you. Fabiane Bizinella Nardon went from being a manager back to tech, becoming a staff plus engineer and creating a staff plus friendly company. She presented A CTO That Still Codes: My Tortuous Path to the Staff Plus Engineer Role at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Becoming an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer
To increase your effectiveness as a staff-plus engineer, it can help to develop your communication, listening, technical strategy, and networking skills. Blanca Garcia Gil presented Five Behaviours to Become an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Remain in Tech by Becoming a Staff Plus Engineer
Engineers who want to remain focused on tech can follow the path toward a staff plus engineer. Staff plus engineers enable others to have impact. Bringing the people along can be hard; you need to work on your communication and influential skills. Nicky Wrightson presented The Secret Strategy for Landing That Staff Engineer Role at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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How Open Source Can Pave the Path Towards a Staff+ Role
Open source contributions and long-term community engagement can help you on your path to a staff+ engineer role. Written communication skills are key for the async and remote work which is common in open source. Your contributions should be aligned with business needs, which can give you visibility that opens up career possibilities. Alex Porcelli presented at QCon London 2022.
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Becoming a Staff Plus Engineer: Leadership and Communication Training Matters
The poor industry support for engineers who want to pursue a technical career affects them; many outstanding technical individuals find themselves forced to seek a management position. The path to a staff plus engineer role is not straightforward. Training on leadership and communication for staff plus engineers can help them to become a better tech leader.
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Creating Tight Cohesive Tech Teams for Women to Thrive
Women in tech need a dynamic, valuing team, stimulating work, push and support, local role models, nonjudgmental flexibility, and personal power. Tight cohesive teams can provide high-quality interactions, making people feel valued.
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Increasing Collaboration at Ericsson: Hardware and Software Developers Learn Each Other's Language
You can integrate hardware and software development with a cross-border team setup, where it’s important that hardware and software developers speak each other’s languages. The suggestion is to focus on “us” instead of “we” and “them”, and on the technical competence that connects developers over agile or lean terminology.
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Shifting to Asynchronous Communication in Software Teams
As some companies begin to go back to the office and embrace hybrid working, they are at risk of alienating those who wish to remain remote, which is looking to be a considerable number of workers in our industry. James Stanier suggests using more asynchronous means of communication and spending more time writing to each other rather than speaking in meetings.
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How to Work Asynchronously as a Remote-First SRE
The core practices for remote work at Netlify are prioritising asynchronous communication, being intentional about our remote community building, and encouraging colleagues to protect their work-life balance. Sustainable remote work starts with sustainable working hours, which includes making yourself “almost” unreachable with clear boundaries and protocols for out of hours contact.
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Adapting a Zero Bug Policy to Solve Bugs
Applying a zero bug policy made it easier to prioritize bugs and increased team visibility and responsiveness towards bugs. As it’s a radical change, you will need to adapt it to your context regarding decision-making and time to fix a bug.
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Dealing with Cognitive Biases in Software Development
Cognitive biases help us to think faster, but they also make us less rational than we think we are. Being able to recognize and overcome biases can prevent problems and increase the performance of software teams.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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How a Safe-to-Fail Approach Can Enable Psychological Safety in Teams
Companies can establish a culture of psychological safety among their employees, a culture in which failing is not frowned upon but rather is accepted as something that can happen to anyone. Safe-to-fail should be part of the corporate culture. A shift in the way we envision success can lead to a better understanding of where failure lies and provide courage to overcome our fears.