Introduction

The word metric often gets, at best, a mixed reception. It is:

A standard for measuring or evaluating something, especially one that uses figures or statistics.

Metrics make process issues apparent, ensuring that risks are identified more quickly and alerting management to take corrective measures.

However, many people are fearful of metrics, afraid they will be singled out as points of failure in a process.

In this post, I’ll summarise the basics of how to design and combine metrics, and provide suggestions on how to make them less scary. …

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 your voice as your instrument.

In this article, I share how I prepared a careers webinar that I’ve given to students at colleges and universities. I’ll take you through the delivery and follow-up process, setting up visual aids, and circumventing obstacles.

Part I — Creation

Create your presentation

I use Google Slides for my presentation.

A well-crafted…

Introduction

Fun virtual events that well-executed will help a team at any stage of formation: from creation to performing or changing and evolving.

They attempt to make up for the lack of interaction, non-verbal communication, and trust-building that comes more effortlessly when everybody is in the office.

Before getting started, it's necessary to consider how you would handle the following three situations (if any apply) to overcome potential awkwardness during a virtual event:

1. How do I help somebody participate more in the event?

Keep a list of the meeting participants and shout-out to quieter team members with a question or exercise.

2. What if somebody talks too much?

Remind everybody before the team-building event to be considerate of…

As a developer, I like to exercise my mental muscles every-now-and-then by going back through cheatsheets and practicing commands.

By sheer chance, I noticed one day that Quizlet beautifully manages cumbersome copy-and-paste tasks involved in creating multiple-choice tests.

It offers two advantages:

1. It allows me to upload data in bulk to create flashcards
2. It takes care of generating randomized multiple-choice options, storing the correct answer, and automatically creating three other wrong solutions.

In this article, I will explain the process of uploading data and generating tests with Quizlet. …

RxJS will make you learn to love reactive programming in JavaScript, especially if you’re working with a complex application that’s got lots things that need to happen asynchronously.

It implements the Observer Pattern — a Behavioural Pattern in software engineering — in which objects subscribe to a stream of events coming from publishers. Think of it like when an Instagram Influencer posts media to their channel, then subscribers are notified that new photos and videos that are ready to watch.

In RxJS:

• An observable is like an Influencer — it’s a producer function that publishes a stream (or series) of…

Introduction

A vector is a quantity that has both size — or magnitude — and direction; as opposed to a scalar quantity, which has size only.

They are of fundamental importance in science and engineering and can describe all kinds of physical phenomena: such as air rushing past an aircraft’s wing, or forces acting on a rollercoaster.

A vector is written in bold, like a and b, and is often seen in diagrams as pointed arrows.

Let’s start with the following vector, u, which is described by an arrow 4 units in the positive x-axis direction, and 1 unit up in…

It will be much harder to argue that people cannot work from home now they have proved they can.

I’m sure we’d all agree with Kevin and Alan Hall in their book Leading Remote and Virtual Teams: Managing Yourself and Others In Remote And Hybrid Teams or When Working from Home.

The authors argue that as people adapt to a new way of working — at least in the near term — leaders must decide how to make collaboration and creativity work in a world where the work-life boundary is more blurred than ever before.

One question that managers should…

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. The backlog can have just about anything in it, such as bugs reported by application users or new features that are queued to be developed.

The team has a Scrum Master — or moderator — who introduces each user story to the group, providing a high-level summary of the requirements. This is an opportunity for the…