Focused on creating great user experiences by attending to folks needs with empathy and spaces of safety. "How you build a product is as important a the product itself". Equalizing the playing field as User Experience Lead/Web Developer at [Dolittle](https://www.dolittle.com).
I’ve been fortunate enough to be interviewed on the Legacy Code Rocks podcast. We had the chance to dive into empathy in software development and cover quite a few topics. I feel it was a really good conversation and I learned a lot. Hope you enjoy it! Continue Reading
When working in a team trying to deliver software things don’t always go right. Quite often they actually go wrong. Sometimes though they go so wrong that there are consequences for others. And when things go wrong, someone is to blame.
It’s natural to protect yourself and make sure all attention is on the next person by blaming and pointing. Perhaps you just sit idly and let others deal out blame and this helps you get by on a day-to-day basis. If you and the people around you are dealing out blame, you aren’t only making it bad for those around you, but for yourself.
The 2016 Empathy Global Index was originally published in the Harvard Business Review. The source of this global index is from The Empathy Business, a UK-based firm “Committed to bringing empathy to business”. This is the 3rd year they have published the Empathy Global Index. Continue Reading
You’re talking about a new feature that’s being planned and prioritized to the dev-team. It’s straight-forward enough, but you sense that it’s latching on yet another feature to an existing long chain of functionality. The team has some reservations to expanding the feature chain even more before doing some adjustments to how it’s been architected to keep this maintainable. That’s when you hear from the product owner: “Just add an if…”. Continue Reading
Dear Lone ‘Team Player’,
Welcome to our team. We care about working together and improving as a whole. We know there are some challenges with the codebase, but are gradually improving as we deliver functionality. Continue Reading
I stumbled over this Gem? when watching Kylie Hunt and Lars Klint speak about “Boosting Productivity through Employee Happiness” on Pluralsight. Continue Reading
Scott Nimrod invited me to a chat, which I gladly accepted. We speak about experiences and social intelligence in Software Development. I hope you find value in the converation. It’s available on youtube here: Talking to Pavneet about Software Development and Social Intelligence.
I first came across Scott in his interview on the Developer on Fire podcast. This happened to be one of the first podcasts I left a comment on. We are now twitter friends, and supporters of each others’ work. Scott has a focus on Software Craftsmanship and a wonderful drive to achieve great things. Check out his blog and multiple interviews (after you hear our chat of course ?).
Scott’s Resources:
I would love to hear your thoughts on our conversation and any value you may have recieved. Reach out to me directly with you thoughts, questions or criticisms. Or leave a comment below.
You’re sitting there, writing code for another feature request and a message pops in. You know it’s important, since it’s a direct message. You glance at the notification and see the words:
Dev: “You broke the build…”
You click the notification and get taken to the 1-on-1 chat, where you read:
Dev: “You broke the build, you fix?
Short and to the point. An efficient message. Perhaps not the most effective though, since you’re sitting there and scratching your head. You’re feeling annoyed. Not because you broke the build, nor that this person let you know about it. It’s because you can’t seem to get hold of the feeling of the person behind the message.
Are they irritated? Maybe mad? Possible stressed out? None of the above? The uncertainty of this can easily put you in a negative state of mind, and that won’t help with collaboration. Continue Reading
As a technical team lead, you are in a unique position to facilitate the growth of your team or watch it spin out of control. You can run it with an iron fist or meekly get overrun by strong forces. You can encourage psychological safety or allow watch things fall apart in a toxic environment.
What makes or breaks a team? How can you bring out the best in the people around you? What can you do as a technical team lead to ensure the success of your team, and as an extension your product? Continue Reading
Picture the scenario: You are staring at the computer screen and scanning the lines of code that fill it. You scratch your head and think: Why?
You debug the code, step-by-step and see a method call that sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s doing an out of process call to another subsystem before the code has completed its job in this method.
Why is that out of process call made there? There’s no documentation explaining why. Moving it to the end of the method makes more sense, but then everything breaks. WHY?
As a software developer, you might have experienced situations like this. You’re looking to fix a bug or extend a feature and you stumble over code that just doesn’t make sense.
You can see what it’s doing, even understand how it’s works, but you just can’t understand why.
In this post I’ll show you why making the extra effort to capture the intent of the code is so important. Continue Reading