Software development lifecycle (SDLC)
Between the end of 2018 and early 2019, I worked with the CTO at Syncromatics (now GMV) to develop a framework for developing an engineering career within the organization. I had the joy and pleasure of speaking with Katie Wilde at Buffer about the groundbreaking work she did and shared…
The relationship between the engineering team and the product team had become deeply exclusive and bordered on adversarial. Engineers felt like the product was being developed behind closed doors without regard for feasibility or clearly-communicated timelines, and product managers felt like engineers were sandbagging and resisting change necessary to reach…
Formerly referred to as “backlog grooming,” backlog refinement is the process of defining pieces of work and estimating the amount of effort required to complete them. Backlog refinement requires buy-in from developers, testers, and stakeholders (product managers, business folks, etc.). Doing this refinement work results in a clearer understanding of…
A four-year old Android app installed on thousands of transit buses needed some serious improvements to usability and reliability. The product team proposed a bold vision for improving the user experience for bus operators, but the development team was mired in a codebase that was hard to understand, difficult to…
I’ve been working on a lot of hardware projects lately: making text-to-speech appliances work on transit vehicles, making software for internet-connected signs, prototyping tools to help me make good health decisions, and building out my go-sensors libraries to support physical environment sensors. I’ve spent a lot of my time as…
In April 2021, I had a problem at work: I didn’t understand how our on-vehicle application communicated with the text-to-speech appliance to make next stop announcements.