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This Is How You Give Good Feedback at Work

Good feedback is all about the little moments.

I have written before that the most important trait in a new hire is coachability. What a shame it would be if you went out and hired an extremely coachable talent, and then failed to effectively coach.

No doubt, there is skill involved in giving effective and meaningful feedback. Here are my rules of thumb, which will hopefully make it easier:

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7 Steps to Reduce Code Smell

I'm the founder of Tellspin, an on-call scheduler in Slack for DevOps and developers (https://tellspin.app). Helping workspaces reduce their contact footprint, resolve incidents faster, and regain deep focus.

Code smell is a way to describe code that hasn’t aged well and has the potential for a lot of issues. 

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Why Development Teams Should Play Roleplaying Games

A while ago, I saw a presentation by Karthik Nagarajan at ThoughtWorks, where he compared a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign to working with product teams. Many years later, I thought it was time we had a chat about the topic, and many months after that, I finally got around to writing it up. A long-running campaign indeed!

Listen to the full interview where we cover much more than this summary including handling alpha gamers, and much more.

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How to Become a Continuous Learner

Today is the perfect day to become a continuous learner.

I had the opportunity to hear Derek Downey, director of the Open Source Database Practice at Pythian, share his thoughts on Adopting a Habit of Continuous Learning at Percona Live.

Derek is a proponent of, "If you’re not learning, you’re dying," and strongly recommends making learning an ingrained habit. Why a habit? Because a habit is when your brain automates the tasks you do on a regular basis like brushing your teeth or working out.