Writing

Our articles and podcast episodes on software engineering, management and collaboration.

Giving Back

Ever since we created our workshop “Real World Refactoring”, we knew we wanted to bring it to the organizations that most need it: the nonprofits and community organizations that pour their hearts into making the world a better place. Unfortunat...

Metrics, Async/Await, and Really Big Hammers

The other night my partner Chris asked me over dinner, “Betsy, how would you handle a call to a metrics library using async/await?” Chris makes developer tools at an e-commerce company. JavaScript isn’t a big part of the stack where he works, but...

Designing a Directed Conversational Interview

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Dr. Daniel Kahneman introduces the concept of a fact-based, structured interview to mitigate the numerous cognitive biases that come into play when assessing an individual’s aptitude for leadership positions. This articl...

Which Auth is Which?

Ever get flustered talking about security? Wish you had a slightly clearer mental model when talking about whose who and what they can do? We've lovingly illustrated a zine that details the difference between authentication ...

Practical Empathy, or: How I Stopped Hating Pair Programming

I used to think I hated pairing. One of my first experiences pairing was with my least favorite co-worker. In my previous programming jobs, I’d always been the only Rails developer, or one of two, and we’d had a lot to do. Too much for us to be a...