Whiteboarding and live-coding exercises in tech interviews are counterproductive
It's no secret that the tech sector currently (2021) uses whiteboard-style interviewing techniques quite often. This can be through the use of actual whiteboards, or services such as CoderPad. But there is a strong body of science that shows these ty…
Instead of asking why, ask “what made you decide?”
Asking "Why did you..?" can make people feel judged or attacked, which is likely to put them on the defensive. In extreme cases, this may even cause an Amygdala Hijack, completely shutting down their ability to reason about a situation. To avoid this…
Effectively asking for help
Increasing your chances of success when seeking help from an expert.
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)
The practice of beginning a message with its key information.
User stories should describe the user or persona before anything else
This immediately places the reader in their shoes, so that any text which follows is read from their perspective. This places the user front and center in the discussion, and helps structure the conversation around their needs. Placing the user at th…
Perform a post-incident review instead of a postmortem
The term postmortem frequently comes up within the context of Site Reliability Engineering and Resilience Engineering. I find the name somewhat morbid and ill-chosen because (usually) nobody dies when there are failures in IT systems. Postmortems may…