Good meetings stick with you and ultimately lead to better outcomes. Find out how to make your meetings more memorable in this excerpt from Kevin Hoffman’s new book: Meeting Design.
Topic: Process
Owning the Role of the Front-End Developer
“The modern developer can’t hide behind a keyboard and expect the rest of the team to handle all of the important decisions that define our workflow,” writes front-end developer Ronald Méndez. Drawing on his decade of experience, he shares advice for going beyond code, sharing ideas, and fighting for a seat at the table.
Feedback That Gives Focus
As creative professionals, we might see ourselves as the hero of our work’s story. But this can make feedback—an inevitable part of our work—seem like the villain. Learn how to reframe your relationship to your biggest nemesis. Make feedback your trusted sidekick instead.
Project Management for Humans
Staffing teams can feel a bit like a game of Tetris, but don’t forget your teams are human beings. They have interests, strengths, and qualities that should be considered above their availability.
Conducting the Technical Interview
Hiring for technical roles can be unnerving. Does your interview plan cover the vital questions? Have you clearly defined the role? Will you recognize the right candidate? Brandon Gregory shares experiences and tips to help you make the right hiring decision.
Team Conflict: Four Ways to Deflate the Discord that’s Killing Your Team
Interpersonal relationships and team dynamics can be tricky. We often eschew the values of team work and working together, but balancing relationships when everyone has a good idea is tough. Jessica Hall shares some thoughts on how to navigate those tricky spots so your team can start communicating and get back to what they do best.
The Mindfulness of a Manual Performance Audit
Sometimes we need to go through the clothes in our closet item by item to separate the chaff, cruft, and impulse buys from what we truly need. An occasional performance audit done by hand, argues Chip Cullen, gives us a detailed picture of our work, increases our awareness of what we ask of our users, and allows us to shape our findings in ways that make sense to stakeholders.
Web Maintainability Industry Survey: How Do We Maintain?
Maintenance is an ever-present aspect of web development, but there simply isn’t much data about what we do industry-wide. To uncover what developers consider best practices and great resources, we’re all taking the (very short!) Great Web Maintainability Survey from Jens Oliver Meiert.
Focus on What You Do Best and Outsource the Rest
There’s all this other “stuff” that has to get done in support of what you actually do for a living. It slows you down and takes away from overall productivity in your specialty, yet you think you have to do it yourself no matter how hard it is for you. Suzanne Scacca says it may be a good investment to offload and outsource some of the tasks that aren’t in your wheelhouse. It just might free up your time to do more of what you do best.
Practical Design Discovery
When we can’t trace low-level decisions back to a specific objective or problem statement, we lose sight of what we should and shouldn’t do on a project. Dan Brown shows us how to create assertions that keep design direction from unraveling.
