Engineering Management

Find a mentor (or a couple of them)

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 08:25:37 +0100

A mentor is someone that provides guidance and is an important asset on our journey to be the best version of ourselves. Sometimes we have mentors and we don’t even realise it. But we should be conscious on who are our mentors, how to get the most out of them, find other mentors that cover other areas and also help them improve their own mentorship skills.

I remember when I was at a company and I found myself with several mentors without realising. Due to some circumstances I had monthly 1on1s with my direct manager (okay that’s to be expected) but also with other people with different kind of roles:

High throughput pull request reviews

Tue, 02 Apr 2019 10:30:42 +0000

I always liked doing deep reviews on pull requests. I’d try to have an ownership mindset. If I approve a pull request, then it’s as if I was the author. I’d need to have full responsibility and would be able to fix or change that code. This approach requires a significant time investment per pull request. And sometimes generated discussions and I always liked to discuss opinions, approaches and iterate on making great code.

But when I started being an engineering manager, I started to be overwhelmed with pull requests to review. I remember a time where I’d start by day having 20 PRs to review, and from different areas (backend, frontend, quality, ops).

I needed to find a way to be effective and be able to add value.

Performance appraisal methods

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 15:10:28 +0000

Is assessing performance important? We usually have performance reviews tied up with end of year bonuses and promotions. I tend to focus more on performance towards continuous improvement. If we have a template of what we should accomplish and how to add value and we can see if we’re on track we can adjust and improve.

I believe that performance talk should be held at 1on1s. We should not wait for the end of the year to give feedback and a score. We should have a continuous process for leveling up people.

Less opinions, more hypotheses

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 17:11:39 +0000

I really like heated debates. It’s great to discuss different strategies of doing things and struggle until we align on a course of action. A healthy and productive team should have heated debates from time to time. But the main point should not be about being right.

I think a lot on how to make these discussions more productive and how to take the most out of every participant. I’ve been trying to pay attention on how we present our ideas and opinions and how other people react and give feedback.

Scaling engineering teams

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 15:25:35 +0000

With growth companies tend to create new ways of work and interact in order to scale. The simple vision of small teams using the some agile methodology simply does not work in growing companies that want to retain talent and keep their engineers motivated. The repetitive work, the fact that small teams don’t have the capability to be responsible for several engineering solutions and the fact that, in a small team, challenges that can be given to a engineer are limited makes growing companies to question the common work methodology and create new approaches to software development.

Pipedrive is one of those companies. Joining the best practices used by the biggest companies and, using this information, appling a major brainstorm, it came out a framework that reimagines the way we produce software development.

Unique interview questions to ask interviewers

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 12:15:09 +0000

Interviews are meant for companies and possible future employees to get to know each other and assess if they are a fit. Usually employers will lead interviews and try to get a sense of how proficient a candidate is. I have favorite programming interview questions that I use to achieve that goal.

I also have a set of questions that I do whenever I’m on the interviewee side. I’ll want to understand how I can add value to the company and how the company will add value to me, as a professional. If we’re to form an alliance we need to be mindfull of what’s ahead.

Lead Gameplay Programmer interview: João Pataca Oliveira - Ubisoft

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 08:28:56 +0000

I’m mostly experienced in building web apps. And I always wondered how other types of applications are built. Embedded systems, mobile apps, desktop applications, etc. Do we share the same practices? And mostly: what can we learn from other ways of working?

In this interview I try to find out the differences to the AAA game industry by interviewing João Pataca Oliveira.

How are their quality processes? How to they ensure a healthy environment on such a fast pace and competitive area?

My favorite programming interview questions

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 20:17:51 +0000

It’s common for companies to have a set of technical questions to perform at programming interviews. We may have a set of generic questions, and also questions specific to the language and technologies we use. Having this script of questions is great for having a common ground between different interviews. If we always ask the same questions, it’s easier to compare candidate performances.

With time I’ve came up with my own set of questions. I have a different style. I favour open questions that let the candidates talk freely about their past experiences.

(You may also be interested in the questions I like to ask interviewers.)

Software engineering KPIs

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 14:47:24 +0000

What would be a good set of key performance indicators for engineering projects and teams? We’re usually accustomed to see KPIs in a business context, and more used by sales, marketing, product squads. But I believe that the exercise of figuring out KPIs is very important. We’re talking about measuring our performance with simple numbers. Is that possible at all?

If we do figure it out, we’d have some kind of software development metrics dashboard. That would have value by itself. We could see were we’re at, we’re we going and the impact or correlation between KPIs,

But it’s very difficult to measure productivity in software engineering teams. Having the work mostly being creative makes the modeling it as numbers pretty tricky. We may look to KPIs that only reflect volume, but neglect to consider added value. The typical lines of code metric comes to mind.

Decision log: result based APIs

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 18:37:32 +0000

I usually advocate for building APIs that have the top level service classes/functions returning results. It’s common to return a value directly, but many times I feel the necessity of returning more things. It can be an error when something goes wrong, or even additional metadata that add information to the returned value.

This is a decision log that discuss if we should use this technique.

Developer speed versus team speed

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 18:00:46 +0000

I was always very focused on speed and productivity, but mostly from my point of view. Developing features fast and with quality is still one of my favorite problems to solve. But now that I’m more of a manager, I have to deal with new insights. How can I balance developers that are so fast that they slow the team down?

Usually developers frown on processes. They want to be left alone working on their tasks and concentrated. And indeed that’s the best use of their time. The problems arise when we have several developer threads working in parallel and we need to sync them. So a new favorite problem to solve is how to make developers productive individually while potentiating the team and the overall output of the team. But for that… I need processes.

Suffering as a source of progress

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 07:59:55 +0000

While reading Atomic Habits I stumbled on a phrase that got me thinking on my goals as a team leader: “Suffering is the source of progress.”

I’ve worked on several projects where the suffering was seen as usual. It was so usual that the developers didn’t even question it at all. I still see it happening to this day even on healthy teams and projects. There’s this thing that happens that causes suffering somehow, but we’re all so used to it that we just take it as is without questioning.

We should track our decisions in a decision log

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 09:20:37 +0000

When we need to make decisions we may schedule a meeting, or start some POC or just lead by example. We’ll need to properly explain our idea, present pros and cons and communicate it well to all interested parties. A process we’ve been using for this is to create a decision log document.

This is similar in concept to a RFC but the semantics are different. While on a RFC the focus is on how we’re doing something and specific details, the decision log is all about presenting ideas and reach an outcome.

Leveling up developers

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 12:00:16 +0000

As a line manager one of my responsibilities is to level up developers. This is something very challenging that I started to like a lot. I have a primary goal on my 1on1s: how can I level up this person? How can I follow the work that is being done and give good, candid, actionable feedback? How can we know that in fact we’re improving?

This starts by trying to understand what my mentees value and where do they see themselves. I try to do that is by asking:

Imagine that you are 10x more better. What does that look like?

If you love them, let them go!

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 19:00:39 +0000

Once upon a time I had a manager that spent the first two weeks of his then new job going through Excel sheets and meetings with the CEO. I had no idea what was going on, none of us in his team had. He was the first to arrive at the office, said good morning to the rest of us as we walked in, had coffee and some informal chats with us about how things were going and for those two weeks that was pretty much it. There was no bossing around or implementing “disruptive” (please do air quotes while reading for full effect) procedures. At some point we were wondering if he was going to do any actual work at all… ever!

2018 in review

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 07:10:32 +0000

I created this blog almost one year ago. It has been quite a ride. I have shared a lot and I have learned a lot also. I’ve published 50 articles, divided in 30 opinion articles, 13 interviews and the rest are references to videos.

During this year I’ve had +20k unique visitors. My top 5 most visited articles are:

Consultant interview: Erik Dietrich - DaedTech LLC

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 18:21:23 +0000

Erik is the author of DaedTech, a blog about software stories that I follow. He has published several books, being Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor the latest.

On this interview we discuss topics that go from strategic decisions regarding code bases, guidelines for building software, how to deliver features with quality and how to make developers more valuable.

Site Tour

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 11:30:12 +0000

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Alliance framework

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 09:54:32 +0000

Last week I finished reading The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age. I really liked the book and it helped me better understand my own views and ideas on growing teams and developers. The book is small-ish and talks about several processes that are used at Linkedin. They also have online materials and tools at The Alliance Framework website.

When I was suggested to read this book I remember that I crused through the reviews and I noticed that several bad reviews had a common theme: they said that the ideas were good and interesting, but that they wouldn’t be possible to implement in a corporate company. That hinted that this book would bring out of the box ideas and naturally I was very interested.

So what were my key take aways from the book? The concepts of tours of duty and the alliance relationship.

Consultant interview: Markus Schirp

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 07:05:02 +0000

Markus Schirp (twitter, linkedin, homepage) is the author of Mutant, a mutation testing tool for Ruby.

In this interview we’ll cover the topic of mutation testing and the added value of incorporating it in our day to day workflow.

We’ll also cover other quality techniques that can be used to improve end to end quality of software deliverables.

Postmortem culture

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 08:33:20 +0000

Things go wrong. This is something that we can try to control, anticipate an plan for. But ultimately we will fail and we won’t be prepared for it. If we consider the amount of interactions we have, the amount of changes by so many people, and the limited amount of resources we have, it should be clear that if we don’t hit some bumps, we’re just going too slow.

One thing that we can do though, is to better handle problems after they happen with a good postmortem culture.

Developer interview: Andre Macedo - Mercedes-Benz.io

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 07:34:13 +0000

André Macedo is a software engineer working at Mercedes-Benz.io.

In this interview we cover DevOps and how it solves comon problems. We talk about delivering fast and with quality and what’s needed to achieve that.

We also discuss how teams can deliver several features in parallel effectively and about the definition of a senior developer.

Common project usage: Makefile API

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 16:37:49 +0000

It’s common for me to jump around between projects. For example, I may be working on a backend service and need to jump to a frontend SPA to help the team on some deadline or other specific goal.

But cloning a new project always gives me bad memories. Not being able to run the tests (or not having tests at all), not knowing how to start/run the project (it may have docs for it if I’m lucky). And the worst part: not knowing how to deploy/publish a new version.

First impressions: mutation testing

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 08:02:20 +0100

I was curious about Mutation Testing and the value we can take out of it. So I took an hour to play with it and try to understand it better.

What’s mutation testing?

In mutation testing we have a program that changes our application’s code and then runs the tests. If no tests fails, it means that we may have a problem. In practice this means that we don’t have a full coverage on that code. This is not about the typical 100% code coverage metric. Because we can have some code that is 100% covered and still find problems with mutation testing.

Zero bug policy

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 18:00:39 +0100

Bugs are a tricky subject. We all write code with bugs and they have a considerable impact on our productivity and on the value added by our deliverables. So we come up with several strategies to handle the bug stream and have a ongoing effort to balance bug house keeping and new features.

I’m a big advocate for a zero bug policy. This means that we should usually have 0 registered bugs. Whenever I present this idea I’m met with skepticism. This is seen as an utopia and not possible. My impression is that developers interpret in a way that would generate punishment when new bugs are added.

But that is not the point. The point is to embrace that we’ll always have bugs, but also aim for a process that will minimize as much as possible the amount of bugs we produce. This will make us leave our comfort zone and question our beliefs.

It’s not about “writing code that never has bugs”. It’s more about “what do we need to change in our day to day work to minimize bugs”.

Product manager interview: Sofia Gonçalves - Resolver

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 16:11:31 +0100

Sofia Gonçalves is a product manager currently working for Resolver.

In this article we talk about what are the responsibilities of a product manager and what are their biggest challenges (for example, defining priorities).

About what’s a good process for product managers and how to deal with partially remote teams.

We also talk about recruiting and mentoring product managers.

The power of abstractions

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 18:02:43 +0100

The other day I was doing a code review and noticed that a mechanism for i18n was added to a new project we’re working on. There was a line like this:

{ key: 'something',
  label: i18n.t('something'),
  value: i18n.n(user.salary, 'currency')}

This is very simple and common I’d say. Even so I left, as I so usually do, a suggestion as a comment:

Suggestion: wrap i18n.t and i18n.n in an abstraction that we control.

Recruiter interview: Goncalo Sequeira - Mercedes-Benz.io

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 18:00:44 +0100

I met Gonçalo Sequeira at a previous company we worked at. He recruited me and because of that I got to interact with him during my full recruitment process.

I learned a lot with him. Soon after he left to boot Mercedes-Benz.io development’s hub in Portugal and I’ve been following his career and still trying to learn from him.

In this interview we cover what’s like to start a development hub, how to recruit the first people and what’s important about them.

Manager interview: Pedro Santos - AMA

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 15:24:50 +0100

These are my replies to my first AMA (ask me anything).

It’s interesting how this made me think and clarify many ideas. I’ve left the AMA format open and added the Ask me Anything page that has instructions on how to receive more questions.

On this interview I give my opinion on several topics regarding engineering management, problems I’ve faced and how they changed me, how to measure performance, how to organise my time and about leadership.

Darkest company

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 20:19:05 +0100

I don’t consider myself a gamer, but I like to play some games from time to time. I usually like games where I need to manage a squad, that have tactical and strategic depth. Sometimes I say that this helps me being a better manager.

It’s not that in my day-to-day affairs I gain from the experience of leading virtual heroes to battle. But I do face new and weird challenges on those games, and sometimes I can correlate to the real world.

Ask me anything

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 19:43:03 +0100

Ask me anything You may ask me anything you’d like about engineering management. I will group these questions and will release AMA posts with them. To register a question you can go to this Github issue and leave your question as a comment: https://github.com/donbonifacio/blog/issues/108 If you’d rather ask something in private, please use the contact options on the bottom of the page. Here’s the list of previous AMA posts:

Being reactive, proactive and forecasting

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 07:50:12 +0100

An exercise I like to do is to try to categorize the typical day to day tasks in terms of the time frame they are responding to. I actually feel that this says a lot about the company’s culture and way of working.

From this point of view, a task can be:

Agile as a side effect of continuous improvement

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 16:37:31 +0100

I never paid much attention to the agile movement. I’ve worked with SCRUM and other methodologies and always had some issues with them. They always felt more like a control structure than an improvement by itself. I do remember the first time we used SCRUM. It felt like a breeze. That wasn’t because of SCRUM itself but rather because using any kind of organisational model when we have none, is always an improvement.

But I did feel much constraints using it. I’d say that maybe we never used it properly. But I do feel that SCRUM is great at some things, like managing risk, but not good at others: like productivity. It helps a lot when we need to build tailor made software to a specific client. When we are sharing the risk with the client and the client pays by the sprint.

Manager interview: Ricardo Vladimiro - Miniclip

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 20:14:30 +0100

I met Ricardo Vladimiro a long time ago when I was active in the gamedev Portuguese scene. I actually had the pleasure of working with him in his startup where we developed several games.

At some point I went back to the web applications world and he started his journey at Miniclip where he turned to data science and grew as a manager. He is a good friend and a good mentor.

He also contributed to the blog with a guest post:

If you love them, let them go!

Coach interview: Monika Wojtasinska-Felicio - TEAMmatters

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 07:00:05 +0100

I met Monika because Ricardo Fiel had referenced me as a team leader. We talked about topics related with leading teams because Monika is preparing training topics for leaders.

I really liked talking with her and felt that I could have so much to learn. Being more focused on executing I sometimes feel that I lack in the theory part.

She works at TEAMmatters where she helps companies change for the better. I learned a lot on this interview and hope it will also be useful for you.

How to convince others that we are right

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 07:37:37 +0100

It’s very common to see discussions or debates about different topics. These discussions can be light or very harsh. We may invest hours discussing trivial things or even days aligning on a RFC.

If we have an idea or opinion that we feel is the right one to follow, how can we make sure that we convince our teammates?

Manager interview: Hugo Lopes - James

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 07:17:01 +0100

Hugo Lopes is leading a Research and Development department that interacts with a product team at James.

This is very interesting. We’re starting to have data science mentioned everywhere and it’s nice for Hugo to share his experience building a R&D department.

We talk about development process, onboarding, training, team management and team performance.

Bug that was not our mistake, except it was

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 09:31:11 +0100

This past week I was pair programming. We had to implement a service object that deletes a model. We actually did it pretty fast and well. It had tests, linter was pleased and we were ready to push it when we noticed that our coverage was not 100% (and we do like 100%, with all its pros and cons).

But we didn’t understand why, because this module should be fully covered. In fact the code was covered when we ran just the suite for that class, but was not covered when we ran the full suite.

Privacy

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 15:35:38 +0100

Privacy This website is mostly about providing content related to Engineering Management. I don’t gather user information and logins, I don’t support comments, I don’t have cookies to track anything. Even so I do integrate with other sites and services that do. Mainly I have a integration with Google Analytics to have some statistics about the visitors of the site. I do follow the advised guidelines on minimizing required information.

The importance of setting goals

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 07:54:29 +0100

Having goals is very important to make sure we’re productive and delivering value.

Manager interview: Joao Cavalheiro - SUSE

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 07:26:50 +0100

João Cavalheiro was brought to my attention due to a talk he gave at a local engineering management group.

We can see the talk’s slides at Totally Networked Team.

Managing a remote team is starting to become a common thing, so I was very interested in understanding how João works and what are the pros and cons of managing a remote team.

Quarterly training plan

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 07:27:23 +0100

Having a continuous learning mindset is very important. To reap the most benefits we should make a plan and have goals on what to learn.

Time bound goals

Wanting to learn new things or accomplish something without a deadline may end up being wishful thinking. If we set a date and a goal we have better chances of achieving it. Imagine that we want to learn Japanese. It’s important to time bound that goal. If we instead say that we want to learn Japanese in one year we start to have a clear picture of what we’ll need to invest in terms of our routine.

Rock Star interview: Ricardo Fiel - Microsoft

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 08:55:19 +0100

I first met Ricardo Fiel when I was taking my degree at ISEL. Then we had different career paths, but ended up working at the same company. He was CTO at RUPEAL and I was a lead developer.

We worked closely for a couple of years. The most vivid memory I have of Fiel is that even though we didn’t always see eye to eye, we always had good discussions and were able to overcome obstacles.

I learned a lot with him and at this day I still look up to him for advices and mentoring.

RFC driven development

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 07:36:15 +0100

Usually we know RFCs from IETF. It’s that document that for example starts to present the HTML spec. But on this article I’m talking about RFCs (request for comments) in a broader sense. Like a tool that can be used by product/engineering teams to better plan and be productive.

Working smart versus working hard

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 08:26:16 +0100

I believe we can split work into two categories: creative work, and regular work. To have a healthy work day we should be able to do both. But regular work is much easier and less demanding. I think both of them can be productive but working smart yields the best results mid to long term.

My framework for one-on-ones

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 07:10:40 +0100

Getting the best out of my team is one of my responsibilities. For that I need personal time with each teammate. But taking the most out of these sessions can be very hard. So I started to build a framework to help me.

How can we tell if we're satisfied with our day to day work?

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 08:20:47 +0100

It’s easy to have a sense of how satisfied we are. But sometimes it’s very tricky to clearly say why we are or are not satisfied at work. So I try to translate satisfaction into several specific topics.

Production incident's training program

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 09:54:56 +0100

Being on call can be daunting. Anything can happen in production and we may be all alone and completely out of our comfort zone dealing with a problem we have no clues about, and with the pressure of having the app down and impacting the business.

The most effective way to implement company values and habits

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 11:10:04 +0100

Having a team that is aligned on a set of core values is very important to have a healthy and productive environment.

Developer interview: David Amador - Upfall Studios

Sun, 10 Jun 2018 09:20:29 +0100

I’ve been following David Amador for a long time. He’s a one man team that created the Quest of Dungeons game. This game is available in 10 platforms, like for example on Steam, Xbox, Playstation, Apple Store, 3DS and Nintendo Switch.

This blog is much about team leading, and it may seem off to interview an one man show. But I do believe that to lead others, we need to lead ourselves first.

I always found interesting all the things that David is able to accomplish and on this interview I tried to understand better what makes him tick.

What impacts our productivity?

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 20:03:44 +0100

I see productivity as value added per unit of time. There are many factors that impact our personal productivity and at the end of the day we’re always part of something bigger, like a team and a company.

Senior data scientist interview: Raquel H Ribeiro

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 08:00:49 +0100

I met Raquel H Ribeiro when I worked at Feedzai fighting fraud. She was part of the team of data scientists that built the tooling to detect fraudulent operations.

It was always very interesting to talk with her about the new fraudster’s trends and how were they coping with that.

And her being a Cosmologist, it was usual to have lunches where we asked all sort of astronomical things. I still remember her trying to explain high levels of abstraction to us, but it was really hard to keep up.

Leaving our comfort zone

Tue, 29 May 2018 18:29:09 +0100

We leave our comfort zone when we get that anxious feeling in our chest and we are conscious that we’re not in control, and that something may go wrong.

Atlassian team playbook

Thu, 24 May 2018 17:10:08 +0100

Continuous learning mindset

Sat, 19 May 2018 07:36:46 +0100

How can we know if we’re learning enough? Or if we’re learning the right things? How can we get some help and find mentors?

Manager Interview: Nuno Silva - Sky

Tue, 15 May 2018 09:20:21 +0100

Nuno Silva is the first guy I remember meeting when I started at ISEL. We’ve been friends ever since. We’ve done most of the course together, we started Orion’s Belt as a school project and worked at the same companies on our first years as developers.

At some point we parted ways and gained different experiences in different fields. But practically at the same time we started leading teams and trying to be better at it. He’s usually my advisor whenever I have some tricky situation to attend to.

In this interview I try to get some insights on how Nuno works and some best practices on leading teams.

He also contributed to the blog with a guest post:

Scaling engineering teams

Code patterns that are a recipe for trouble (part 2)

Sat, 12 May 2018 08:35:56 +0100

In part 1 we went through several patterns related with writing code that is more maintainable. This article focus on code patterns in testing and also concerning readability and style.

Code patterns that are a recipe for trouble (part 1)

Tue, 08 May 2018 08:35:56 +0100

Sometimes I notice that I have just wasted one hour or so because of some bug in my code, or something that I did wrong. When that happens I try to step back, understand what I did and try to come up with a change in my way of working that will prevent it from happening again.

Recruiter interview: Sara Gorjão - KWAN

Sat, 28 Apr 2018 07:35:26 +0100

Sara Gorjão is a great recruiter that has helped me a lot over the past years. I’ve asked her for developer profiles very complicated. For example, Clojure developers or developers willing to learn Clojure, seasoned functional QAs with automation experience, senior developers, etc.

And she always delivers great people. She doesn’t have a technical background but it’s amazing the technical fit of the profiles she finds and how she can match them to our needs. And if in the technical side the candidates will already be in our ballpark, her capacity to deliver candidates that match our culture is outstanding.

Sara is a one-department-recruiting-pipeline. It has definitely been a competitive advantage to have been teaming up with her. She is responsible for the Permanent Placement Branch inside of KWAN, which means that if you want to hire talent to work directly on your team - to be hired directly by you - she would be the person to talk to.

Do you feel recognised at your company?

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 08:02:25 +0100

Feeling recognised is about employees feeling that the company really values their work and presence at the company. That the company has a long term vision for their relationship and is actively invested in growing them.

Developer interview: Tiago Sousa - Sky

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 19:50:13 +0100

I’ve know Tiago Sousa for a really long time. We were both students at ISEL, we did some classes together and actually ended up doing our thesis together. We worked at Orion’s Belt, a massive online multiplayer game, and it was one of the best experiences I had as a developer.

We then started working at Safira and then moved together to PDM where we worked on several projects. We later parted ways and each one of us had our own path.

Tiago is a seasoned developer and currently is working at Sky. He had several team leaders and managers and on this interview I try to understand what’s his opinion on being the best manager.

Create an onboarding template

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 10:21:05 +0100

Joining a new company, and sometimes even a new team, can be a daunting experience. It’s all the new things that change and that we need to accommodate for. A new routine, a new office with maybe a new commute route, all the new tools and processes that may be different. And new people to interact with.

That project where no one wants to work at

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:10:46 +0100

There are projects that one one wants to work at. There could be many reasons for that and I list here some that I’ve seen. Being aware of these problems is the first step to start fixing them. And most importantly, by being aware of these problems we can start from day one implementing processes that prevent these kind of things from happening.

Dealing with deadlines

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 16:35:36 +0000

I usually like to ask the following question when I’m interviewing developers:

Imagine that you have a task that you estimated to be 2 weeks. It’s now two weeks from the deadline and you realise that you’ve made a mistake and that the task will take 3 weeks to do. What do you do?

The question is vague on purpose and usually shows how mature the developer is.

From Rails to Clojure, then to Java, then back to Rails

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 10:36:55 +0000

In the past 6 years I’ve worked on web applications in Rails, Clojure, Java and back to Rails. This is an overview of these past years, the benefits of working with such different tech stacks, and also it’s drawbacks.

Why should we aim for 100% code coverage?

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 17:36:55 +0000

I never worked on a project with 100% code coverage. I’ve worked on several projects with a high coverage and a test suite that gave confidence to the team. But even on those projects sometimes we’d have a nasty bug in production that could have been easily detected with a simple test.

This is a tricky subject and usually developers don’t care much about this or think that it’s not worth the cost, or even that is not that useful. I’ve gathered here several arguments in favor for a full coverage.

How to take great engineers & make them great technical leaders

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 22:50:21 +0000

About

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 22:22:10 +0000

I have been a professional developer since 2006 after graduating with a CS degree from Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa. I’m an engineer at heart with a passion to build, lead and serve high-performance teams through excellence in hiring, team culture development, personal development and coaching, as well as a constant push for high quality deliverables and DevOps engineering practices. I aim to be hands-on whenever needed and I’m always on the lookout for better ways to improve processes, increase productivity and solve root problems.

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 22:22:10 +0000

Subscribe Subscribe the mailing list if you want to receive a monthly digest of my articles on engineering management. I also add interesting links to articles and threads. #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. / Subscribe to the mailing list indicates required Email Address * (function($) {window.

Are you a giver or a taker

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 10:58:02 +0000