How to be successful as a web developer

…in 5 easy steps:

1. Stop complaining about the client.

2. Stop complaining about the project.

3. Stop complaining about the team.

4. Stop complaining about the technology.

5. Start solving problems.

How to become a better programmer in 90 days

Foraker Labs just posted this (unofficial) YouTube video of the lightning talk I had a chance to give at the Mountain.rb Ruby conference last week in downtown Boulder, Colorado:

How to Become a Better Programmer in 90 Days

In this brief talk I present highlights from three books on my required reading list that (I believe) will help make you a better programmer:

• The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Thanks to Derek Olson for taping and editing, and thanks again to Marty Haught for organizing the conference!

Teaching clean code principles via de-factoring?

Here’s a new idea (to me, at least): Teach clean coding principles by starting with some very readable, very clean code. Then refactor (defactor) it into an incomprehensible, indecipherable quagmire of messy awfulness.

Why? The topic of “clean code” is a tough one to teach. Ask a random sampling of programmers and you’ll probably get a wide variety of opinions about what constitutes “clean” or readable code. Everybody has their likes, dislikes, and preferred idioms. And when we start with code that seems “bad” and try to talk about what “cleaner” code would look like we often end up talking in circles, debating what “good” code really means.

So in effort to avoid letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, I’m thinking it might make sense to try to play around a bit with de-factoring as a tool. Let’s see how it works if we start with something we might call clean, and then work to make it much worse, talking about what it is that makes it worse along the way.

Stay tuned. There’s hopefully more to follow on this topic!

Management by walking around

Part 3 in a series on managing programmers

The third installment in this series is about something I learned well before I got into management. In fact, it’s probably the reason why I got into management at all:

Get up out of your chair.

As geeks we’d rather just sit there. Sit in our chairs and send yet another email and hope enough folks read it. We spend a whole hour crafting a brilliant treatise on an Important Topic and assume that our written words alone are motivating enough to get people to do what we need them to do. And we hope (in vain) that people will read our words carefully, reflect deeply, and return the favor by drafting a well-written response of their own.

But when it comes to managing people email simply doesn’t work as well as we wish it did. It’s often the wrong tool entirely. You know this as well as I do. People simply don’t read your emails carefully. Or they miss it entirely. Or the message gets to them too late. Or too soon. And even when they do read your email, people can almost always manage to misinterpret the tone of your message and you end up spending even more time clarifying and apologizing and re-iterating. Et cetera.

In my experience, the only thing that does work is to do something that is entirely unnatural for most in the world of high tech: Get up out of your chair and practice some “MBWA“. MBWA stands for “management by walking around“. It means you go and walk over to somebody and actually engage in conversation. Talk to them. Talk first about the weather or their kids or whatever they’re working on at the moment. Then transition the conversation to what you need to talk about, or just drop in your request casually at the end. And sometimes, just like magic, you learn things without even having to prod. It goes like this:

Tammy sitting reading email. Manager enters, stage right.

Manager: “Hey, Tammy. What’s new?”
Tammy: “Just reading the latest missive from the client. They’re being a little less insane than usual today.”
Manager: “Nice! Always good when sanity prevails, eh?”
Tammy: “Yeah, absolutely. We can use a little bit of a break after yesterday’s server issues.”
Manager: “Wow, really? I must have missed that somehow. We had server issues yesterday?”
Tammy: “Yeah. It turns out the new audit trail feature caused our logs to fill up and we ran out of disk space.”
Manager: “Ouch! But yeah, that makes sense. You’ve got it fixed now though, right?”
Tammy: “Yep. We’re purging logs every 30 days now.”
Manager: “Good deal. Client seems happy?”
Tammy: “Sure. They seemed to like that we responded so quickly.”
Manager: “Excellent. Thanks for jumping in there!”

Manager exits, stage left. Elapsed time: 45 seconds.

3 reasons why MBWA can make you more effective

• It’s faster. Yes, it is. You might think you don’t have time to get up from your desk and actually go through the hassle of walking over, interrupting the person in the middle of their Facebooking, and actually talking about what needs to get done. But in the same 5 minutes it would have taken you to write an email you’re able to not only make the request but respond to questions immediately.
• It builds relationships. Being face-to-face with someone puts you in a position to tailor your message to the individual and respond immediately to questions in a way that is most effective for that person. Moreover, engaging people one-on-one helps build the relationship — you learn more about each other. This learning is the foundation of trust, and having trust means your conversations will end up getting faster and more effective over time, especially during a crisis or when speed is of the essence. And having more face-to-face conversations also ends up making it easier for the other person to interpret your “tone” when you only send email or IMs.
• It helps you learn and know more. As a manager you deal in information, and you’re missing out on at least 50% of the data feed if you’re not there in person. As I’ve already said, actually getting up and talking to other human beings seems counter-intuitive and at least somewhat stressful to most of us in technology. And here’s the thing: Most of our team naturally tends to avoid the face-to-face conversation as well. Yet the example above shows that it’s through the quick face-to-face interactions that we’re able to learn much, much more about what’s actually going on in our organization. Your team member may be too busy fighting a fire to send a detailed email, and maybe he’s not the type to swing by and chat either. But being there allows you to sense and prod and follow hunches, all of which end up providing you with more information, making you more effective.

So don’t just sit there in your corner office typing on the computer. As a manager your job is all about making everybody more effective by getting the right information to and from the right people at the right time. You just can’t do that with email alone. As my good friend and colleague Derek Olson likes to say: “The weeds are waist high. Sometimes you just need to stand up to see over them.”

How to get an “A+” on your performance review

My advice on how to get an awesome grade at your next performance review is to simply follow Rands’ advice:

@rands, 1/11/2010: “Be productive, be fantastically clever when necessary, speak truth to power, hit your dates, and don’t ship crap.”

By the way, if you’re a programmer or a manager of programmers and you’re not reading everything that Michael Lopp, a.k.a. Rands in Repose has to say, you’re missing out big time.

Make the call

Part 2 in a series on managing programmers

The second lesson I learned after being thrust into management was this:

Make the call.

Management didn’t confer any secret knowledge or special skills. Nothing about me had really changed from one day to the next. Except that all of a suddenly folks around me expected me to make the tough decisions.

Suddenly people would approach me with an issue. I’d listen and try to figure out what the problem was, and maybe think up a solution or two. Then I’d try to ask them what they thought about it. Hey, you’re smart. We’re paying you to know this stuff. So what do you think?

And more often than not they’d respond with something like: “Well, um, I’m not sure. That’s why I’m asking you.”

So here’s the crazy thing about being in leadership:

People expect you to lead.

I’m lucky. I get to work with wicked smart folks. So I expect them to have thought things through. And I’m usually no where near the most qualified person to make this decision. But there you have it. When the going gets tough your team members will expect you to make the call. That’s right, you’re “The Decider“, for better or for worse.

And this is a Good Thing. Making the call is, after all, why you’re there. Yes, it’s your job to make tough decisions in the face of uncertainty and lack of information and time pressure. What’s more: If you want to keep on making “the big bucks” and retain that fancy manager title then those spur-of-the-moment decisions will need end up being right more often that they’re wrong.

No pressure.

At the end of the day, being asked to make the call with insufficient information day in and day out is one of the major reasons why I see plenty of smart geeks quickly leave management roles or try to avoid them at all costs. It’s not really in our nature, because most of us technical types are information-driven. We’re type “C” in the DISC model, as the cats over at Manager Tools like to remind us. Our default mode is “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…”. So making decisions quickly without enough information makes us really nervous.

Moreover, problems are often political. Yep, that’s part of the job too. Often the best technical answer to the problem is pretty clear to see, but implementing it means somebody’s feelings are going to get hurt. That’s why your team is coming to you. And while taking responsibility for something that might get somebody fired seems like a tough gig, it’s really the most important and best thing you can do. Really.

So if you’re a geek who’s suddenly found him or herself in a leadership role, and now everyone’s looking to you to make the decision, how do you do it?

Tips on how to make tough decisions

• Accept responsibility for the decision. This is really important because it’s where you get a chance to exercise your role power and political power in a really positive way. By accepting that it’s your job to make this tough call, you’re helping to take the pressure off of your team member. It’s very often this pressure to make the right decision that’s brought your team member to you in the first place. And removing some of this pressure will help free them up to focus on solutions and not consequences.
• Ask for recommendations again. It goes like this: “Hey, thanks for coming to me with this issue. It’s definitely a problem, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out. So tell me… if time/money/politics weren’t an issue, what would you recommend we do?”. So first take the pressure off them and then try to get them to re-engage. Remember, they’re usually the one with the most knowledge. And it’s always good to take another quick look around before jumping.
• Go get consensus. If you need to get up out of your chair and ask other folks what they think about a given problem, do it! Not getting up out of your chair is probably the number one mistake technical managers make. So stand up. Call a hallway meeting. If Kevin’s brought you a problem that Jake might have insight into, then drag Kevin over to chat with Jake. And make sure you get to a point where folks agree. Consensus is important because you need this to help make the decision stand.
• Don’t delay. Avoid the temptation of avoid putting off a decision indefinitely. Commit to a date and time. “I’ll let you know what I think by COB.” Or: “Let me check with Bob and get back to you within the hour.” It’s very natural for us to want to wait, but remember that your teammate brought this issue to you because it was important. While you sit and ponder your team is very probably at a standstill.
• Link decisions to principles and goals. When you end up at an answer to the question or a solution to the problem, it’s a good idea to try and frame it in terms of a general principle instead of a specific solution. Choose a direction (“North”) instead of trying to specify a specific path (“42 paces to your left”). Leave yourself and your team some flexibility by letting the folks who are going to have to do the work handle the details of a specific implementation. It sounds like this: “Well, I hear you on how we’re running out of time on this project, but since we’ve all agreed that we need to do as much testing as possible even on legacy code, I’d say let’s identify the 3 most critical features and write tests for those, for starters. Do-able?”. Focusing on principles means you’re focusing on what’s reasonable based on a larger context and previously established norms.
• Decide on plans not rules. “We must have 100% test coverage” is an empty decision without a corresponding plan for how you’ll achieve the new goal. Recognize that a decision is nothing without a plan for acting on it. While it is useful to make a general principle the foundation of your decision, it’s important to end with a plan for how the decision is going to be implemented. Here’s how that sounds: “Yes, we I agree we need to attack some of the underlying problems with the architecture. So why don’t you begin by make a list of sections of the code that already have good test coverage? Then we’ll know where we can start with the least chance of breaking things.” At the end of the day plans are more flexible, more comprehensible, and more likely to succeed in the real world than arbitrary rules.

Of course, it’s not as easy as I make it sound. But at the end of the day it’s what your team needs you to do. So make the call. It’s what you’re for as a manager.

What do you think?

Part 1 in a series on managing programmers

If I have any management secret, it’s this: Every now and then, when one of my team members asks for my opinion, I try to pause and answer with one simple question:

What do you think?

I’ve been managing programmers for over five years now. That’s a long time in internet years, and I’m to the point where I don’t think it would be too out of line for me to start sharing some of the tips, tricks, and techniques that I’ve learned about how to manage software developers and engineering types.

The first management tip I’m sharing dates back to the very first day on the job as a manager. I’d been working with my fellow web developers in a small-but-growing shop, building a couple of fairly substantial applications used by the collections and law enforcement industries. Then one day my boss took me out to lunch for my annual review and I got promoted.

On the drive back to work I realized that I was suddenly in a position where I would be managing some of the folks who’d hired me. I had deep respect for every single one of these people. All of them were wicked smart. Most had engineering or science degrees of some sort (easily trumping my history degree), and many of them had more practical experience developing web applications than I did. I’d already learned a ton from each of them during my time with the company, and I knew I still had lots left to learn.

And that’s when it hit me. Before I’d read a single book or blog post or listened to a single podcast on how to manage software developers I realized that the one thing I couldn’t lose was input and feedback from the folks on my team. In that respect nothing had changed. Being in management hadn’t magically conveyed any special abilities or secret knowledge. Just because my title had changed didn’t mean that they had nothing to teach me or that that I no longer had anything to learn from them.

So I from that moment forward I made it my practice to try to pause and ask this question at least once a day. “What do you think?”

I didn’t have all the answers at the time. And that hasn’t changed in five years. And, in fact, the key realization was that as a manager it’s actually not my job to have all the answers. My job is to work with my team to find the best answer to a given problem.

As managers of knowledge workers it helps if we start by recognizing that our teammates have probably already come up with at least one or two answers on their own. Programmers, engineers, and scientists are problem solvers by nature. It’s what they do. So I try to get behind this. In fact, I specifically try to use my role power as a manager to encourage and support this whenever possible.

Moreover, we can use this one simple question to make it clear that we’re not just merely curious or playing to their egos, but that we expect our teammates to come to us having already thought through the problem, and to have a possible solution or two in mind.

In my experience, asking “what do you think?” helps accomplish three things:

1. It empowers team members by letting them know that I will actively solicit their ideas.
2. It sets the expectation that team members should have already thought through the problem themselves.
3. It demonstrates that I care more about finding the right solution than about being the one who came up with the solution.

In five years I’ve read plenty of books and articles and blogs about management in general and managing knowledge workers in particular. But I still come back to what I learned on my first day of management. “What do you think?” is a specific, practical technique that flips the power structure on its head and helps me demand the best that my team can bring.

So every now and again stop to ask your team what they think. You and your team will be better for it.

Reading is fundamental

I was knocking about on LinkedIn this morning and saw they’ve added a new “Amazon Reading List” feature. So I took it for a spin and wrote up quick reviews for three of my new favorite books: Chad Fowler’s Passionate Programmer, Martin Fowler’s Refactoring, and Bob Martin’s Clean Code.

Then I thought: Why should LinkedIn have all the fun? So I’ve added a new page to my site called Reading where I’ve posted the reviews.

“What are you reading?” is one of my standard interview questions. And despite never having enough time for anything I do try to read a few new books on programming, management, and business every year.

Let’s see if I can keep this up.

Developer Day in Boulder

Yesterday Jake and I enjoyed attending Developer Day at the TechStars facility in downtown Boulder.

Highlights included meeting Chad Fowler, author of one of my new favorite books The Passionate Programmer. It turns out Chad and I are, literally, neighbors. His house in Longmont is just a few blocks away from my own.

Another interesting moment was hearing Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java, express his belief that “Java is likely going to become a legacy language.” Also a bit surprising to me (though I’m sure it’s old news) was his deep love of Python — a language free from the design constraints of backward compatibility that have plagued C++ and Java. Yet another reason that Python’s next on my list of “languages to learn”.