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An example of the errors of “best practice”
Some time ago I wrote about the error of slavishly following “best practice” without asking why. And I was reminded of this again the other day when a friend forwarded me a blog post by Eyal Guthmann in the Dropbox tech team. The post explains that the team used to try to share as much … Continue reading
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The other day I was having a conversation with someone about requirements and software design. We had a description for a small system, and I was saying “this is the design; this is how we should implement it.” He had a different point of view, and was saying “These are requirements; we are free to … Continue reading
A little while ago I was working with a team that had a lot of user research to do. Naturally, we only had limited time, so we needed to decide how to prioritise our work. This is how we did it. First of all we wrote out all the ideas we wanted to examine. Some … Continue reading
The other day I was at an Underground station where there were a number of charity collectors with buckets. I put a coin in a collector’s bucket and he gave me a bright yellow sticker in return. At first I was unsure about wanting it; it’s the kind of thing I’d have loved when I … Continue reading
Welcome
Hi. I'm Nik Silver. I've been leading software teams for years. My specialism is helping organisations work effectively with their technical teams, to deliver business value frequently and consistently. Take a look at my experience.
If you want to talk about turning talented people into brilliant teams then get in touch. I'm nik@niksilver.com on e-mail, and I'm @pigsaw on Twitter.
Recently spotted
- The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android | Dropbox Tech Blog"By writing code in a non-standard fashion, we took on overhead that we would have not had to worry about had we stayed with the widely used platform defaults. This overhead ended up being more expensive than just writing the code twice."
- WeWork isn’t a tech company; it’s a soap opera - The Verge"The We Company isn’t just a regular real estate company, then; it’s a real estate company that’s taken a lot of money from SoftBank and other firms by just saying “tech” a lot."
- ExtraHop BrandVoice: How To Talk To the Board About Cybersecurity"Both CIOs and CISOs play an ever more important role in how business gets done, and as their roles have grown, so too has board scrutiny."
- “Managerless” engineering: the first month - 21st cto - Medium"Over the course of half a year, I wrote monthly articles on the main challenges and learnings we had with the Tribes model. Getting this to work, and work well, is a highly iterative process..."
- My Code Review Journey - Convoy Tech - Medium"...what are some ways to achieve these goals when it’s your turn to review someone else’s code? Below is a mental checklist I put myself through during the lifecycle of a code review."
