drcathicks
This was a strange, hard year. For me it was a year of many changes and much work, and investment in laying foundations and planting seeds. It is not yet possible to evaluate the effectiveness of these labors, so I am going into 2026 hoping that this year of somewhat monastic work, striving and survival will yield something good. At any rate, it brings me joy to list some of the good-in-the-moment…
One of the best things that can happen at a conference is a thing you can't plan for but only hope to encounter: a really good...
After a life-changing journey building the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight, the difficult decision was made that it's time to wind...
HERE is the full video of the talk! Thank you to Amy Hoy for this charming description of my talk , and to Hazel Weakly for a delightful...
Yesterday I listened to this podcast with Phil Cousineau because it came up in the dice roll of my driving playlist (I haven’t read the...
You know what I realized? I've been putting a lot of work into audio scicomm (or as most people call it, being on podcasts) and I haven't...
In November, Ana Hevesi and I published the first version of our Cumulative Culture Theory of Developer Problem-Solving as a preprint,...
Whenever I start a research project, I pull from my fiction-writing toolkit. One of my initiating questions I use to interrogate any...
For the last three years, I have thought often about why individual-level "explanations" of developers' ability, potential productivity...
The following is not a blogpost, but rather a direct copy of the text from a post I made on Linkedin today . I have an uneasy...
I made up this term the other day and frankly, I just liked it so much that I wanted to document it on my blog so I would remember it....
Today I'm giving a talk to the fabulous Bridges Summit . I'll come back to this post to share my talk once it's available! Meanwhile, I...
I recently had reason to remember and re-read this important piece: Use caution when applying behavioural science to policy. I also had...
We've been busy. Developer Thriving: four sociocognitive factors that create resilient productivity on software teams Co-authored with my...
Note: For me, 2023 was defined by battling through and recovering from severe and life-threatening illness. Am I better now? Idk. Far...
I can't stop thinking about this lately. After several research projects and across 25+ in-depth sessions with teams tasked with...
In the last eight months, I've talked about our Developer Thriving framework with junior developers, with industry analysts, with crowds...
Last month I was lucky to get to go to Monktoberfest for the first time -- and bring Dr. Carol Lee and Morgan Ramsey, the two senior...
I recently had the chance to listen to a talk from Dr. Claire Meaders about her intervention science work in scaffolding better and more...
Thrilled (and frankly, exhausted in that great-bone-deep-I-made-something way) that I can now share this with you: the Developer Success...