Work

2020 has taken the concept of “new normal” and given it a whole new lease of life. It’s a word that’s been thrown around so often but it’s true – it’s permeated every aspect of our lives. Our once loud and proud office culture has been replaced with remote work; the ultimate “new normal” for businesses around the world. We’ve had to juggle family life and childcare with our usual working routines, shifting from video calls to email on a near-constant basis to stay “updated”. ...

Language is one of the most powerful tools we have as humans. It binds us. Instructs us. When used well, it creates a common understanding. And it’s essential for creating an environment where everyone feels welcome and included. Historically, language has left many out. Individuals and groups have been marginalized and discriminated against because of their culture, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, socioeconomic status, appearance and more. ...

The Rules (according to Graham) Don’t use @here unless it is truly relevant to everyone in a channel Don’t use @channel unless there is a fire or a nuclear explosion that everyone needs to be aware of now Use targeted Slack group mentions for getting a hold of stakeholders in a channel (i.e. @support_ in the #support channel) Use Slack as an asynchronous medium, not a synchronous one (assume people will not respond immediately, rather than the opposite) Link: Why you shouldn’t use @here on Slack ...

Stop interviewing, stop organising the off-sites, stop onboarding, stop fielding requests from users, stop anything that sounds like team building. Stop helping other people with their work. Archive mail. Quit slack channels. Do not curate the team roadmap. Crucially: don’t catch things that are about to drop. That’s incredibly hard for a lot of us, but remember that the rest of the team already does this. Stop being the unofficial lead. (If you’re in the same situation and you’re the official lead, consider stopping that too!) ...

I often need to look up details in the Mozilla Developer Network documentation (MDN). It’s a great resource, that keeps getting better every year. A few years ago, I learned that lovely people have set up a very convenient “url shortener” / “search service” to do an “I’m feeling lucky” search on the MDN documentation. In your browser’s URL bar, type mdn.io/‰s, where %s is your search string. Hit Enter and arrive at the best matching page on MDN. ...

In order to get the development environment on localhost closer to the production environment, I’m using HTTPS on localhost. This helps me with discovering bugs much earlier, which saves a lot of time. I use the excellent tool mkcert for managing the certificates locally. mkcert is built exactly for this purpose and removes most of the friction. I regularly use httpie to interact with HTTP servers. However, httpie doesn’t know about about the certificate authority installed locally by mkcert, so we’ll have to help it a bit. ...

If cognitive diversity is what we need to succeed in dealing with new, uncertain, and complex situations, we need to encourage people to reveal and deploy their different modes of thinking. We need to make it safe to try things multiple ways. This means leaders will have to get much better at building their team’s sense of psychological safety. Link: Teams Solve Problems Faster When They’re More Cognitively Diverse

A lot of my work in the last decade has been with partially or entirely distributed teams. I expect that to be the case going forwards as more and more software engineering work switches to distributed / remote teams. To communicate with other members in the distributed team, I use video calls for: pair programming the daily standup call 1-1s the weekly leadership call company all hands / town hall catching up with friends This is post is for sharing some things I’ve learned that give me a more joyful experience with video calls. Maybe some of the tips can improve your experience. ...

On Wednesday 2020-01-29 at 18.30 there will be another Homebrew Website Club in Berlin. Venue The event will be hosted in the eyeo office. Zimmerstraße 69 10117 Berlin Germany Ring eye/o GmbH doorbell which is located in Zimmerstr. 69, between ishin and Viet bowl. The door on the street is always open, the next one isn’t, and the office is at the first floor on the left ...

Full-stack software engineer with a bent towards web standards, quality and longevity of applications available for hire. I have worked professionally as a software engineer since the late 90s. I’ve seen a good breadth and depth of applications over the years, having worked on green field, established and legacy applications. I enjoy improving existing applications as much as working on green field applications. Happiness looks like Organisation People first organisations Diversity and inclusion Effective, open, bi-directional communication (NVC) Product / project Users first thinking User Story Mapping NoEstimates, forecasting Open minded pragmatism Technology Lean Web Progressive Enhancement Web standards ECMA-262 Accessiblity (WAI) System fonts What I am hoping to find in my next role I am hoping to find a diverse team in a diverse organisation (or one that is trending that way). I regularly contribute to open source and hope to continue that work in my next role, perhaps in combination with mentoring of other engineeers. ...