Predictable. The team has a regular cadence. They can set goals and expectations around deadlines. Challenge: Shipping compiled code. Most advice about improving team velocity talks about continuous delivery. Ship constantly! As many times a day as you call! Roll back if you need to! Tell us about that time you broke prod! YOLO! Here’s a fun […]
When talking about team effectiveness, the first thing to consider is what an effective team looks like. Predictable. The team has a regular cadence. They can set goals and expectations around deadlines. Clear on priorities. When you ask people what is most important and why, they can answer. Connected. People work together and take an interest […]
Since January first, I’ve been posting a picture a day on photo.cate.blog. Now I’ve been doing it for long enough to consider it a proper project, I asked one of my colleagues for a suggestion for a better theme, and she suggested this one – Cubic. I really like it. An incomplete list of what […]
I’m working on a talk about running effective mobile engineering teams – I’d love to know what questions you have about this, what you worry about when it comes to mobile teams in your organization, and what you’ve found most helpful to communicate about them. Comments or email or DMs on Twitter welcome! Title: YOLO […]
One of the things I wanted to do more of this year is explore photography. Sometimes I worry that creating a photo editing app and writing a book chapter about creating image filters sucked some of the joy from photography for me. I wanted to do more with my pictures for their own sake, rather than […]
I released Show & Hide nearly a year ago now and it’s now free on the app store. It’s not set the world alight, and I haven’t made the progress I wanted to on releasing the Android version (still in beta), but it’s got a few nice comments, and I’ve seen some beautiful photos. Here’s one of […]
Speaker notes from a talk I gave earlier this year at Try!Swift, and 360iDev. There was an article I read last September that profoundly affected my thinking. It was by Sarah Tavel, and is called “Times have changed — going after dollars vs minutes”. She breaks products down into minutes – which I think of as attention […]
There’s a handy thing in Espresso called the ServiceTestRule, which is for testing Services. Yay. I thought it was just what I needed until I read this bit of the documentation… OK, first up – refactoring my IntentService. This class already did very little, poking something else depending on the kind of Intent it received, and […]
I discarded my Android watch in the UK. My brief period as the kind of idiot that wears two smart watches is over. I’m all in on iOS. The irony is I actually preferred the Android wear, I haven’t really made sense of the Apple Watch and it’s even more annoying to have a bunch […]
One of the (many?) things my team may be tired of hearing from me is “empathy is part of our job”. What do I mean by that? Well as mobile developers, we are the closest to the humans that use our product. We need to have empathy for our users – what do they need? […]