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Career

Dimensions of Engineering Growth

One of my coaching clients and I developed this framework to help him think about the kind of impact he wanted to have as a Staff+ engineer, and since then I’ve taken it to other clients and direct reports in a way to think about engineering growth outside of any particular job ladder. The four […]

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women in computer science

Addressing Hiring Gaps Through User Research

The hiring hot take is a regular feature of every tech conversation. Newsletters. Conferences. Blogs. Twitter. We talk about hiring a lot, because the market is competitive, and hiring well makes a big difference. Hiring effectively goes well beyond the “quality” of people you hire – it sets them up for an experience inline with […]

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management mobile Presentation

Upcoming Talk on Effective Mobile Engineering Teams

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 […]

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Career Programming

All the Leaves are Brown and the Sky is Gray

It’s a weird thing to reflect on my career and realize that very little of the code I wrote is still in production – because very few of the things I worked on are still in production. Most of the products I have worked on have failed. We build with bits not bricks. Architects and […]

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WISE women in computer science

You Get What You Incentivise

It’s about 18 months since my friend Tracy wrote this post pointing out that whilst the tech industry evangelises data for decision making, there is very little available when it comes to diversity numbers. And about 12 months since we started seeing companies release their numbers. Helped along by radical shareholder action from Jesse Jackson Sr. […]

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Career Education Programming WISE women in computer science

Friends Don’t Let Friends… Become PMs

Recently, I heard about a school that has a mandatory “technology” class that students have to take in order to take CS classes in later years. It features: wood-working, circuit building, and Excel. This is horrifying. I want to go there with picket signs and stage a protest. Dress up as robots and chant things. […]

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Education Programming Reflections

Not a Scientist, Nor an Engineer

When I was doing my undergrad, I knew a lot of geography students. One of them told me that geographers spent a lot of time debating what geography was. I found this completely ridiculous, of course, imagining the only thing to be more pointless than studying geography was angsting about nature of geography. (Of course, […]