They also promote people who value all of these skills: patience, mentorship, and people who demand technical excellence while acknowledging what it takes to get there. Who you promote will tell your org chart how you want the organization to look, so it’s important to spotlight people who share ...

Bill, who was working on (ostensibly) a missile defense system, with instructions written in machine code. He got to a point where he thought he figured it out and asked Marilyn to review his code.

Code review was still in the nascent stages in those days, and Weinberg writes, “His value s...

There are three things that I’ve noticed in my own career that developers need to become better:

• the room to make mistakes
• repeated exposure to best practices
• understanding how to ask good questions, or learning how to learn

In “Rise of the Expert Beginner” , an essay that I re-read every couple of years, Erik talks about how developers stop learning. His basic thesis, based on previous studies of skill acquisition, is that p...

we now call it psychological safety.

The simple story is that, in a good, productive software environment, you have the room to mess up. The apocryphal story about how this works is the one where the junior developer breaks production, costing the company thousands of dollars. After he sees...

Learning how to ask the right questions at the right time is one of the fundamental skills of being a developer. Formulating the right question takes a lot of time, a lot of trial and effort, and a lot of tinkering with ...

Marilyn found 17 bugs in the 13 lines of code. Instead of fuming, Bill’s reaction was to go around and tell everyone how impossible this code was, and how hilarious it was that she had found 17 bugs. While he was doing that, a few people joined in, for at this point, it was a game, and found a fe...

So how do we get everyone on our teams to that place?

How do we help others get out of the dark, frustrating place that is the local minima of suckiness that is the expert beginner, past the stars, and into the cloud?

And, how can we help ourselves become better developers?