my agile mind

career

The Staff Engineer - A Staff Engineer's perspective

In this article I want to give a brief overview of what I think is expected of a Staff Engineer, what you should aim for to be good and how you can learn and progress.

career

The Senior Software Engineer - A Staff Engineer's perspective

In this article I want to give a brief overview of what I think is expected of a Senior Software Engineer, what you should aim for to be good and how you can learn and progress.

career

The Professional Software Engineer - A Staff Engineer's perspective

In this article I want to give a brief overview of what I think is expected of a Professional Software Engineer, what you should aim for to be good and how you can learn and progress.

career

The Junior Software Engineer - A Staff Engineer's perspective

In this article I want to give a brief overview of what I think is expected of a Junior Software Engineer, what you should aim for to be good and how you can learn and progress.

career

How work changed being a Tech Lead

In this article I share the things that changed in my work life after becoming a Tech Lead. Especially I will cover how my contribution to the team changed and how my view changed in general.

career

My Tech Lead journey

I share my experiences of working in a Tech Lead role for the past two and a half years. I write about the fuzziness of the role and what my expectations and those of others have been at the beginning. Finally, no one can tell you what this role is about because every team is different.

agile

Working in a non-agile environment

When I write non-agile environment I do not necessarily mean an environment that does not use an agile methodologies like scrum [https://myagilemind.com/2015/07/31/what-is-this-scrum-all-about] or kanban [https://myagilemind.com/2016/01/23/a-short-introduction-to-kanban]. What I mean is an environment that is not agile [https://myagilemind.com/

focus

Email is a suboptimal medium for collaborative work

The problems of an inbox are widely discussed. Switching attention because of your unread count leads to a context switch and loss of focus. One solution is to check your inbox only a few times a day or week [http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/03/22/how-to-check-e-mail-twice-a-day-or-once-every-10-days] (this is crazy dude,

agile

When your partner starts improving the process

I wrote about our retrospectives [https://myagilemind.com/2015/12/01/what-to-do-in-your-retrospectives] already in an earlier article. In this one, I would like to write about my personal experiences of changes that your partner suggests to the meetings. I started using the way of holding retrospectives mentioned in the referenced

agile

My learnings as a part-time scrum master

I experienced the pretty fast growth of a company I worked for, in which scrum is used as the development process. When companies grow, teams get bigger or new teams form. In my particular case the company used to have one scrum master - let's call him Jim - that

agile

The necessity of the scrum master role

In one of my past articles [https://myagilemind.com/2015/08/14/scrum-the-team-and-the-events] I briefly mentioned the roles in a scrum [https://myagilemind.com/2015/07/31/what-is-this-scrum-all-about] team. One of them is the scrum master who guides the team to be successful applying scrum. But why do you need

scrum

Using an analog or a digital board

A key point in scrum [https://myagilemind.com/2015/07/31/what-is-this-scrum-all-about] is transparency. To create transparency of the work of a team the board plays an integral part. A discussion point in multiple scrum teams I worked in was if the board should be digital or analog. I asked

agile

Should I estimate my free-time tasks?

When I started introducing agile methodologies in private life and in my family I thought I have to do it the right way. For me this included story estimation. It turned out that for me this is not the right way of organizing my free-time and projects in our family.

agile

Fail fast, fail often

“Fail fast, fail often”. You read and hear this sentence a lot in the agile world. It is supposed to be a good practice. But why exactly is this a good practice - not only in agile? First of all, failing feels bad, right? You usually invest time and energy.

agile

A short introduction to Kanban

Nowadays kanban is considered to be an agile software development methodology. In fact, it is also a synonym for a token that is running through a kanban system. Kanban has its roots in physical manufacturing at Toyota [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Origins]. That was in the 1940s. At

family

New Year's cleaning

For some time already my wife [http://tinyminimalist.de] and me take multiple [http://bemorewithless.com] people [http://into-mind.com] as an example [http://zenhabits.net] to reduce the stuff we own and that usually accumulates in your shelves. Over the past years we were able to establish some kind

dogs

When dogs are the better humans

We have our dog for three years. Time passed by pretty quickly. I can say that I learned a lot in this time about dogs: how they behave, why they behave like this (although this one is quite vague), what they do differently compared to us humans. However, there are

focus

Focus bursts

The world in general and my environment specifically gets filled with more and more distractions. Concentrating and getting stuff done is not easy in this surrounding. There might be people that are able to cope with this. Sometimes it is also for me possible. However, if there is a constant,

agile

What to do in your retrospectives?

I already gave a short overview of retrospectives in the context of software engineering teams [https://myagilemind.com/2015/08/14/scrum-the-team-and-the-events/#thesprintretrospective] . There are several books for this available and I won't go into detail about this. What I would like to focus on in this article is how

prioritisation

How to keep up with the tasks in your priority backlog?

I already presented my actual priority backlog in a former article [https://myagilemind.com/2015/08/27/prioritizing-your-ideas-and-projects]. When I started using it I asked myself how I will be able to really work on the priorities I wrote down. The key of learning First things first: if you really

agile

The sprint length

A sprint [https://myagilemind.com/2015/08/14/scrum-the-team-and-the-events/#thesprint] is an iteration and at its end user value should have been created. It includes the sprint planning at the beginning and at its end the sprint review and retrospective. The sprint includes short daily sync meetings called daily scrum

family

The living agreement

When a scrum team [https://myagilemind.com/2015/08/14/scrum-the-team-and-the-events] is founded one of the first things to do is to set up a working agreement. A working agreement is a contract between the members of a team. All members should adhere to the contract at any point in

family

Get your family on board: Scrum in the family

Maybe your family is still manageable - only you and your partner. Maybe it is rather big with you, your partner, kids, a dog? Whatever the size of your family might be there are always small (or big) projects going on, stuff that needs to be communicated and things that

agile

Avoiding mistakes with the Not-To-Do-List

In a previous article [https://myagilemind.com/2015/08/27/prioritizing-your-ideas-and-projects] I wrote about how I try to keep focus when learning new things. While learning I made mistakes that - in retrospective - I would like to avoid in the future. Learning Years ago I got interested in Ruby

prioritisation

Prioritising your ideas and projects

As a software engineer - or any other kind of engineer I guess - it is kind of natural that you want to suck in as many cool technologies, programming languages and ideas as possible. This happens to me quite often as I am working in a fast paced environment