There will come a time when you will need to add to your team. This can be due to a team member leaving, the workload becoming more than your team can handle, or because you want to expand what your team does. In any of those cases, you will need to start the arduous task of finding someone new to bring to your team.

There is one important piece I’ve left out of the puzzle until now—creating and crafting a culture that makes people want to work on your team and stay on your team. If you have a company culture which does not attract people, employees will be hard to find.

About the only thing that makes me upset as a lead developer is people that do not play ball. I am completely for questioning authority, asking questions about workflows, and having ideas on making what we do work for everyone, but it really bugs me when someone doesn’t even try to work with the team.

The tech industry is a double-edged sword. On the one side, we (generally) have well-paying jobs with nice perks, but on the other, we can easily slip into not only boring, repetitive work but figurative death marches. The former is used by most companies as an offset to the latter, but that rarely works out […]

This month, let’s discuss what we can do to help come up with better estimates. I hate estimating, but it is an unfortunate part of software development. We cannot come up with schedules without estimates. My boss wants to know I’m not wasting his time when I say something will take 40 developer hours. I […]

Everyone on your team should have a good idea of the actual problem or feature they are working on before any code is written. Once the issue itself is ready to go, the work can begin. Every company will be slightly different in how they want to handle actual commits, but this month I will […]

Issues and issue tracking are central to your team’s communications about what’s getting worked on and needs fixing. Having a clear and agreed upon standard for working with them will keep your team focused and productive while minimizing misunderstanding.

Over the last nine months, I have talked about all of the things you should be doing as a technical and developer lead. There are many things that you should be doing, and I hope that so far the advice has helped. These are some of the habits and problems I have seen as developers […]

The tech industry is a relatively young industry, and in many ways, it shows. In one of my favorite books, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy talks about the birth of the open source industry going back to the late fifties and early sixties. Many of his descriptions of programmers then are not […]

As a development lead, one of the best things you can do for your team is encouraging and fostering an environment of ongoing learning. There is an entire world of developers out there who stagnate in their jobs because they don’t learn anything new. It does not have to be a whole new language, but […]