Developer Tea

Developers tend to create process for themselves and a shared process with a team, but what defines whether or not a process is useful? In today's episode, we're talking about feedback loop processes and the reality of their usefulness.

Take a moment and imagine three or four days ago. Replay a mundane event, like your commute. Imagine each movement and turn you need to make to arrive where you need to go. In the last episode we talked about feedback loops and in today's episode, we're talking about how that feedback loop can lead to automatic response systems and how to build better feedback loops that encourage continuous learning.

We are embarking on the end of the decade. January 1st, 2020 marks a new decade and this means a lot of people are reflecting on the past decade. Specifically on their own individual improvements. In today's episode, we're focusing on self-improvement, specifically focusing on the idea of a feedback loop and how we can use them to explicitly change and improve.

In today's episode of Developer Tea, we're talking about wasting time on features we hope are useful, but turn out not to be. We can't control for every single variable, so how can we better predict the usefulness of a feature before building it? How do we justify the work that we do?

Imagine for a moment that you don't have a concept for what a podcast is. In today's episode, we're talking about shared concepts and the ideas that come out of a group of people who share the same concepts to meet a common goal. If you couldn't put a name to your experience, how can you communicate it?

Titles for developers are meant to quickly describe our function we play on a team and allow us to set expectations. Where this can go wrong is when we struggle to understand what a title means. In today's episode, we're talking about problems that can occur when roles are unclear on a development team and how to solve these common problems.

Requests are tied to expectations. In today's episode, we're talking about managing overload of requests and managing expectations so we can focus on our goals and have better working relationships with ourselves and our coworkers.

If you were born one year earlier, something would likely have changed in your life. In today's episode, we're taking a moment to express a bit of gratitude for the environment that we grew up in, and the people who helped us build our careers today. What lessons we can learn from the people who developed before us?

If a team agrees to a set of goals and values, then our priorities should align, yet it too often falls on individuals to negotiate their priorities with the team. In today's episode we'll ask the question; how do teams decide priorities? Should we allow individuals to negotiate their priorities or should this fall on the team to determine together what each individual's priority should be in working toward a common goal?

How do we end up in a place where our responsibilities and commitments outrun our cognitive ability to fulfill them? In today's episode of Developer Tea, we'll talk about the responsibilities we choose to take on and how to identify commitments that can overwhelm us and discuss a way to take back control of your day and succeed in the commitments we agree to.

Your words have power. They can influence the people around you. Your words matter. In today's episode, we're talking about what our words mean to our fellow team mates and how we can use our words to leverage our influence and provide clarity in what we say to represent ourselves and our fellow co-workers.

Meetings are often times the only chance to have a face-to-face conversations with your co-workers and can occasionally end in good feelings that only fade as the week goes on. In today's episode, we're talking about the value of meetings, understanding the work and what needs to be done in order to keep the work moving forward. How can we avoid the false sense of positivity that can occur after meetings and how can we engage in the right kinds of meetings?

Vocabulary is the basis of language and unique cultural meaning. Developers share a common code and have created their own vocabulary and language over time. In today's episode, we're talking about how sub-cultural language is established at a company level and how that language development can either help or hurt a new employee's experience.

Hopefully the last episode about modifier functions and behaviors helped spark and idea of how you might change small behaviors and cascade that into bigger behaviors. Like leaving your phone outside of your room before you go to bed, leading to better sleep and during the day, better focus. In today's episode, we're taking the ideas of changing small behaviors and zooming out to look at the roles we play in our lives and how we can evaluate the roles we play to lead to positive daily behaviors.

Context is a big deal in the job of a developer. In today's episode, we're applying a zoomed out model of thinking to everyday behavior to make us better developers, co-workers and leaders.

If you were to list your values today, it's likely that the list is not simple. There's a lot to understand when we try to explain what we think and our place in the world as we see it. In today's episode, we're talking about how we can practice our values and stay focused without overanalyzing every detail.

What causes us to do the things we do? In today's episode, we're discussing the complexity of motivations and identifying the chains of motivations in our actions as developers. How can our chained motivations help us consider the motivations of our co-workers around us and how can we choose better actions to better reinforce positive behavior?

Senior engineers will often answer questions by peers starting with, "It Depends." In today's episode, we're talking about getting beyond the "It Depends" answer by challenging us to asking questions as they regard to context. How can we provide more context and help fellow developers make decisions in the face of uncertainty?

We've talked a lot about questions on this show. Questions are a powerful tool for developers and our collaboration. In today's episode, we're talking about questions as they lay the path to where our conversations lead us. How can we ask better questions?

Anil is the CEO of Glitch, an activist, writer and host of the podcast, Function. In today's episode, we sit down with Anil to talk about animating motivations, community building and career goals. ##