Recent posts from Joel Chippindale's infrequent reckons
I really enjoyed attending and speaking at LeadDev Berlin in 2023. Here are just a few of the things that I took away from the conference. When to make quick decisions I learned the most from Nicky Thompson’s excellent talk, “Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions”. This was jam packed with information to help us understand how our brains work (both for…
Summary The best engineering leaders know that you can have both speed and quality when developing software. Indeed, the only way to keep up the pace of delivery is to build high quality software. Everybody wins. However, all too often, it can feel like you are not in control of the quality of your code. You can feel like your team doesn’t have time to develop high quality code. You can feel like…
In the words of Bill Gates, “Everyone needs a coach” . This sounds like a slightly flippant answer. Let me expand on it with my own experience. I am proud of my work in all the roles that I had as a start-up and scale-up CTO. But I learned how to be a CTO the expensive way. By this I mean that, for most of my career as a CTO, I learned by making mistakes again and again and slowly…
There is a common stereotype that software engineers are primarily motivated by the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology. Falling for this stereotype can lead to a sense of helplessness about motivating engineers because, “we can’t introduce cutting-edge technology here”. Or, even worse, the introduction of a new technology solely to satisfy this assumption. In my…
Your CV (or résumé) tells a story. You want the story that it tells to be that you are an excellent candidate for the role that you are applying for. Your CV’s most important job is to make sure that you are selected to get an initial interview. I’ve reviewed hundreds of CVs over the years. Applicants who make it easy for the person reviewing their CV to see that they are a great match…
A good metaphor helps us communicate our ideas by providing an easier way to approach them. A bad metaphor gets in the way of clear communication. “Technical debt” is a metaphor that is often used in software development as part of trying to explain some of the trade-offs we make when designing software, and the costs that we incur because of the lack of quality in our software. However, the…
Corey Chiver’s Mandlebrot Orbits , are a fascinating way of visualising the Mandlebrot set. I wrote a version in Javascript to make them easy to explore in your browser. Enjoy.
When I joined Unmade, our Engineering Team had already adopted a number of practices associated with agile software development, for example continuous deployment, daily stand ups and regular retrospectives. However these were being carried out in isolation from other disciplines in the company and so, although many were useful practices, they were not having nearly as much impact as they could…
Mentoring someone outside of your company can be a really rewarding experience that helps you learn too. My first opportunity to do this came about through luck rather than planning. When I returned to a technology role, as CTO at Unmade in 2018, I committed to make more of an effort to build professional relationships with people outside my organisation. I am not confident in group networking…
In this talk I outline what continuous delivery is, and explore some case studies from a range of companies who practice continuous delivery and how they benefit from it. This should give you a clear idea of how continous delivery reduces risk on software projects and make it easier for you to explain the benefits of this approach to your colleagues. This is part of a series of talks and blog…