Category: Leadership

So you want everything to work out just right; get and keep everything in a perfect and clean state. I think many of us engineering types want everything neat and 100% predictable. I know I tend to be this way. But often, this tendency works against us. Pushing for perfect, or the complete handling of…

You will learn a lot during your first year as a software developer. But the biggest surprise may be how vital communication is to the success of software projects. Many of the things learned during the first year boil down to communication. Project management, task management, standups, iteration planning, and retros are all really about…

The future isn’t certain, but my decisions today will impact tomorrow. We had agency in the past, we have agency in the present, and that agency will impact our future. Sometimes we joke that a particular problem is for “Future Us”. Sometimes we shorten it to “FU It”, Future Us it. This is a silly…

Last week was AIM’s Heartland Developers Conference (HDC) in Omaha. Spread out over three days, this annual event was held at the CHI Health Center arena (a change of scenery from the past several years). Each day was geared toward a different experience level: Novice, Pro, and Expert. This year’s event allowed me to do…

When we began thinking about what would become the Nebraska Dev Lab Pipeline Program, we had one goal: create more software developers in Nebraska. But as time went on and we took a hard look at the state of the industry, we realized that we could also make an impact by helping to create a…

The recent news cycle has been relentlessly documenting the effects of the pandemic on our workforce and attempting to predict where we all go from here. Almost every business leader I’ve spoken with recently has this as a concern. And it’s no wonder, given the sheer amount of change happening, the amount of uncertainty, and…

“We learn from failure, not from success!” – Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula Last week, I gave a presentation called “Leave Nothing to Chance” at the Nebraska.Code() conference. The essence of the talk was the value of locking down all the little decisions to better ensure success in your software projects. I started the talk with…

Angular has an interesting history. Angular started in 2010, and it grew into a very popular web framework. But at some point, it was decided that the current Angular structure needed a significant change. So in 2016, a new version of Angular was launched. This broke Angular into two major versions. The v2+ lineage is…