Team Management

The Subtle Art of Hiring Apprentices

Lately I’ve been talking with students at programming bootcamps about their overwhelming fear that they’re not learning quickly and thoroughly enough to find employment afterwards. I think it’s generally produced more by the intensive crunch-time atmosphere of the schools and growing recognition of how big and complex programming is than by an actual deficiency in skills.

March 4, 2015

Pairing with Junior Developers

Thanks to all the coding bootcamps out there, many tech teams hired their first junior developers last year. Many more are now considering it, and debating how to go about it. Looking at the community chatter on this topic, it's clear that onboarding junior devs into a team of mid- and senior-level folks is not a solved problem. Hell, my company is heading into its sixth cohort of apprentices, and the question of how to structure their time still provokes passionate debate internally.

January 27, 2015

Get the Most Out of Your Consultants

Here at DevMynd, the two primary things that clients hire us for are product
design/development and developer training. What they don't realize is
that they can also look to us for an objective opinion on their team and its
strengths and weaknesses.

March 8, 2014

Building a Customer-centric Team

If your organization has customers you must have a customer-centric team in order to succeed. Customer-centricity should permeate every level of the organization, and all the processes that help your teams be productive. At DevMynd we spend most of our time working with customers and over the years have learned how to build a team that's fixated on customer satisfaction and success. Whether building a Ruby-on-Rails web application, a mobile iOS app, or a highly scalable back-end system in Clojure, customers are the constant.

January 1, 2014

The Joy (and Benefit) of Small Teams

I’ve had the occasion recently to work on some projects in very small teams, just 2 or 3 others at most. This experience has rekindled in me a joy for this kind of working environment and atmosphere. There’s just something about not being lost in a sea of teammates or (even worse, leading a giant team) that really appeals to me.

May 14, 2012