Giving and receiving feedback January 15, 2018 Recently I gave a brief lightning talk in our regular Friday all-hands meeting on how to give and receive feedback effectively. Whilst some of it was based on my previous experiences, most of it was pulled together from a few sources and people who have influenced me. These are the notes from the presentation. Why is feedback important? By providing each other with useful and more productive feedback we can help those around us...
Taking retrospectives to the rest of the business October 13, 2017 The Product Development team at Driftrock has been using retrospectives for just over a year and it’s served us really well. In that time we’ve made loads of improvements and changes to how we work. Those changes range from small tweaks to our process to large uncertain ideas which we trial for a limited period. Our process for a retrospective is fairly typical (in my experience); we do them fortnightly and we rotate the facilitator role who runs the session how they see fit...
Programming is a bit like football, isn't it? May 19, 2013 The title of this blog post makes is purposefully tongue-in-cheek, let me attempt to explain. As a kid football was everything, I played a ridiculous amount. Lunchtime and after school kickabouts, perhaps training twice a week and then two matches at the weekend. It was great and academia was not so great. I was a pretty average student – not the worst, definitely not the best and certainly not interested. So naturally I grew up and became a Software Developer...