Get the Rush of Running Great Presentations — Introduction Don’t get nervous at the thought of delivering a presentation, particularly these days when talks are increasingly delivered over webinars and within the comforts of our home. There’s no magic 🔮 involved — all you need is a single document to read from and the ability to sound confident, using…

Put Them On The Right Path — Introduction First of all, a caveat — I’ve never been a line manager to a software engineer but have coached developers in previous roles in an informal way. I put together this article to identify five common problems that might be causing a developer to struggle in his/her performance, along with…

Raise PRs That Everyone Will Thank You For — Introduction You might think that NASA astronauts spend most of their time trying to break records for the longest spacewalk. Of course, you’d be wrong. The vacuum of space is fraught with dangers, so astronauts spend most of their time going through checklists — lots and lots of them. Checklists are…

Introduction Before we cover Planning Poker and the PlanITPoker application, let’s first recap how a sprint planning meeting works in a typical development team. In an Agile project, a sprint planning meeting is held to discuss backlog items that have been prioritized by the business. …

A Simple Routine to Follow in Times of Anxiety — In today’s blog post, I’m sharing a technique I learned many years ago during cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat mild anxiety symptoms. It’s a very simple technique called “breathing in a square” and can be followed easily, whether you’re waiting your turn to present during a conference call, or…

Exercises to Get You Up To Speed Quickly — Introduction This article can help you if you’re already familiar with Java and you need to: Prepare for interviews, or Reacquaint yourself with the language after a period away from Java e.g. moving from frontend to a backend project. Each part consists of a “drill” that explores topics in Java. The…

Exercises to Get You Up To Speed Quickly — Introduction This article can help you if you’re already familiar with Java and you need to: Prepare for interviews, or Reacquaint yourself with the language after a period away from Java e.g. moving from frontend to a backend project. Each part consists of a “drill” that explores topics in Java. Names…

Some Recommendations to Make Sprint Retrospectives More Effective and Less Tedious — Introduction Let’s be honest — many developers hate the retrospective at the end of a sprint. Often, team members feel it’s a waste of time: a 30-minute discussion in which nothing changes and is simply a meeting that just has to be done to check a box in an agile process. …

Revise Java’s Exception Handling Mechanism Quickly — Introduction This article can help you if you’re already familiar with Java exception handling and you need to: Prepare for interviews, or Reacquaint yourself with the language after a period away from Java exception handling e.g. moving from frontend to a backend project. Each part consists of a “drill” that explores…