I keep relearning the benefits of building the next thing instead of the whole team. Whenever possible, bite off only as much as you need to make forward progress and leave the rest of the project to the project plan.

One of the hardest things about managing talented technical people is telling them “no” when they have a high level of enthusiasm. Here is why it’s necessary and one technique for doing so.

“Infrastructure as Code” is a simple concept that provides expansive opportunities. I’ve had the pleasure of setting up another project using the IaC model and was reminded of how much value it brings to modern web services.

One of my staff made a decision to leave the company and my team. She is on her way to another position. It’s important to me to support my staff in all of their decisions, especially when it means they’ll no longer be working with me.

A member of my team has demonstrated exceptional technical proficiency and is motivated to learn as much as he can. However, he’s developed the awareness that he doesn’t know quite all of what he needs to know. This is an incomplete list of the things that I think makes for a stellar general purpose programmer.

Not all advice is good advice. Additionally, not every bit of advice is for you even if it’s addressed to you. Evaluate the advice that you get deliberately.

Learning to accept all of the incredible help that’s floating around me.

I made a mistake earlier in my career when I ignored an obvious performance concern in an application. The engineer said the magic phrase “premature optimization” and I allowed the code to merge. I learned a lot from that experience and now consider reasonable optimizations to not only be appropriate, but necessary to be responsible programmers.

As I thought about my hobbies and how it relates to my career, I started to reflect on the ways that advancing in powerlifting paralleled career growth.

I was recently working on a production outage and utterly befuffled about my ability to make any meaningful changes that would improve our situation. My team and I found ourselves surprised by the eventual resolution.