Welcome traveller 👋

Given the uptick in people looking for roles right now, I thought I’d share some tips for getting hired as a developer. These tips are things I look for when hiring developers, honed over many years and countless interviews. My aim is to shed some light on what people over the other side of the desk are thinking. Perhaps armed with this perspective, you will think differently about your own approach. ...

In this post, I wanted to walk through an approach I used when building a calendar view in Swift for an iOS app I’m working on. The requirements were as follows: Should start from the current day, and then scroll backwards through time Each month is it’s own section, with corresponding header Days should be a selectable square cell, and we should have 3 days on each row The grid should take up as much screen real estate as possible It should be memory efficient And with any luck, it will look something like this… ...

The intention of Performance Review 101 is to give engineering managers an understanding of why we have this process, and what’s involved. I’m sure you’ve all been in one of these meetings, and no doubt loathed having to prepare. But you only get out as much as you put in, and they’re a great way to develop your employees. Not convinced? Then read on… Why do we need a Performance Review? So first up, what is the point of this meeting and the hours of prep that go in prior? The key reason we have a performance review is to understand and improve your employees performance. This is with respect to both their personal needs and goals, but also the business needs. It’s not to say their performance has to be poor, but rather how can we help take it to the next level? To be clear, this is not an exercise in criticism and demoralisation. If there are performance expectation gaps, the review should aim to bridge them in a constructive manner. ...

I recently built a website using Gatsby , choosing to host it on the Netlify free tier. One of the features I wanted to try was form handling. Typically, handling form posts requires wiring up and hosting a backend to process requests. Netlify forms allows me deploy a simple static site with zero backend, letting them handle the rest for me. You can read more about the functionality here . ...

Having moved between these two types of company, I wanted to capture my thoughts on the differences between enterprise and startups. Why would you work for one over the other? Is one option the clear winner? Firstly, when I talk about enterprise and startups, what do I actually mean? For the context of this post, I’m talking about tech-enabled companies rather than tech-led. These are companies whose main source of revenue is not from the sale of tech per se, but is enhanced by it. Think banks or insurance companies rather than FAANG . ...

The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins is a must read for anyone looking to change role in their career. This means not only moving to a new company, but being promoted or even changing career. It details a set of methodologies which, if used, will ensure you succeed by contributing value as fast as possible. The book is a healthy mixture of commentary and practical tools. Early wins … for the win After reading the book, my main takeaway was making early wins. Intuitively, this makes sense but it was useful to see written down. When entering a new role, your boss and team will want to see results and validate their decision to hire. The main way to achieve this will be in your early wins. ...

Following on from my post about using time effectively , I thought I would deep dive into a tool I created using the Trello API. The reason behind this work was that I had multiple Trello boards and projects in flight, each using a Kanban column layout. I needed a way to see all of the tickets I had in Ready or Progress states and there didn’t seem to be an obvious solution using Trello itself. I also just fancied having a play with their API. ...

Effective use of your time can make a real difference to the impact you have. By employing good organisational techniques, you can achieve much more in those valuable hours than otherwise. Following the lessons I learned as a manager , I wanted to run through a couple of methods I use to structure my day both personally and at work. Note that these are methods which work for me. I am not writing this as a golden bullet for all time management. It’s important to understand what works for you and tailor a system accordingly. ...

The next book in my series of reviews is called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni . The book focuses on what the author describes as the five dysfunctions which cause teams to underperform. Whilst the book is written from a board level, it’s clear to see how each of these dysfunctions could apply to any level or size of team. In fact as I was reading this book, I often spent time contemplating examples in my day job. The book is written predominantly as a fable meaning there is a narrative to follow. I enjoyed this aspect as it really brought the dysfunctions to life and enabled me to imagine them at work. ...

As promised all the way back in my NDC Wrap-up , I wanted to share my findings using Azure Functions on a recent project. As always, the story begins with a user requirement. The use case was to build a news monitor which would check a given list of sites and email through any new stories over the last day. My immediate thoughts turned to Azure Functions as a solution. Amongst other reasons, they are quick to spin up/code, would cost little-to-nothing to run and have built in support for timers, file monitors etc… ...