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Ep 37, On What Makes for Bad Rollouts

A Programmer, Refactored

Release Date: 10/23/2017

Ep 66, The Blameless Postmortem show art Ep 66, The Blameless Postmortem

A Programmer, Refactored

Have you ever worked in a blame-focused culture?  It's a toxic culture, to say the least.  Searching for blame after a bug has shipped accomplishes little and promotes bad politics.  A listener emailed me an article from Code As A Craft that talked about Blameless Postmortems.  It's a great concept, and it accurately describes some of the better cultures I've worked in, though it has its downsides.  In this episode, I deep dive into the various concepts.

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Ep 65, Technical Professionals With Non Developer Backgrounds show art Ep 65, Technical Professionals With Non Developer Backgrounds

A Programmer, Refactored

Have you ever had to work with senior technical professional who didn't have a background as a developer?  It can be a tricky relationship.  In this show, I respond to a listener's email who'd recently been assigned to work with a solutions architect that didn't have a developer background.

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Ep 64, Fighting Against Company Culture Is Often A Losing Battle show art Ep 64, Fighting Against Company Culture Is Often A Losing Battle

A Programmer, Refactored

Have you ever worked at a shop where you loved the coding aspect, but hated the culture?  Maybe they were too concerned with ship dates, or overly preoccupied with architecture, or spent too much time chasing frameworks.  When we find ourselves in these predicaments, we often strive to change those parts we don't like, typically with poor results.  In this episode, I dig into that phenomenon.

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Ep 63, Where Does The User Fit In All This? show art Ep 63, Where Does The User Fit In All This?

A Programmer, Refactored

The user's place in the software development has changed a lot in the last ten years.  Way back when, the user was a faceless entity that we tended to avoid.  Today, thanks in no small part to the Agile movement, users and user representatives are often key stakeholders from the beginning of the SLDC.  In this episode, I dig into how I think the user fits into today's software development process.

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Bonus Ep 3, Reputation: A Cautionary Tale show art Bonus Ep 3, Reputation: A Cautionary Tale

A Programmer, Refactored

Reputation.  As programmers, we tend to hang most of our reputation on our coding abilities, if we even think about our reputations at all.  As very technical people, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that reputation is for managers and other political game players.  The truth is, however, that reputation is highly important, and ignoring that can have horrible consequences.  In this episode, I give a cautionary tale of a programmer who didn't heed that lesson.

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Ep 62, Gatekeeping and Shadow IT show art Ep 62, Gatekeeping and Shadow IT

A Programmer, Refactored

Gatekeepers, those IT professionals who become so possessive of their systems that they become more of a hindrance than anything else.  In this episode, I talk about gatekeepers in the context of software development and how they lead to shadow IT efforts.

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Ep 61, The Art of Self Management show art Ep 61, The Art of Self Management

A Programmer, Refactored

The ability to self-manage is one of those things that separates an average programmer from a senior developer, in my opinion.  In this episode, I talk about the importance of being able to manage your own time and work and strategies for doing so.

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Ep 60, People Skills vs Developer Skills show art Ep 60, People Skills vs Developer Skills

A Programmer, Refactored

Software development is only partially a technical skill.  As your career progresses, your people skills become as important.  This is true even if you're never put into a leadership role of any kind.  In this episode, I cover three tools I've used to help with my people skills game:  Non-confrontational language, tactical empathy, and open-ended statements.

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Ep 59, How I Moved Past Writing Code Professionally show art Ep 59, How I Moved Past Writing Code Professionally

A Programmer, Refactored

Last week I talked about how I realized I no longer want to write code professionally.  In this week's episode, I go into how I arrived at this point in my career and how tech turnover pushed me into thinking beyond just implementation.

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Ep 58, I Don't Want To Write Code Anymore show art Ep 58, I Don't Want To Write Code Anymore

A Programmer, Refactored

The other day while sitting at my desk, I had a sudden realization:  I don't want to write code professionally anymore.  I still enjoy it as an intellectual challenge, but professionally I'm in a different place.  In this episode, I dig into the topic and go over some honest truths I've realized recently.

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More Episodes

Last week I talked about rollouts in general.  Today we're going to talk about ways I've seen software rollouts go horribly wrong.