Freek.dev

At Raycast, the dev team only requests code reviews when they think it's necessary.

Read more [www.raycast.com]

Adam Wathan recently started hiring the first employees of his brand new company. On Basecamp he shared how they work.

Read more [public.3.basecamp.com]

On Basecamp's Signal v. Noise blog Claire Lew warns about the dangers of wanting to be nice all the time.

Now I’m not advocating for us to be mean. Disrespectful or dismissive leaders help no one. Rather, I’m calling for us as leaders to loosen our grip on “being nice.” To stop wanting our team to like us all the time. To let go of the expectation that every single interaction with our team should feel good. ... When we’re preoccupied with seeming popular instead of fair, when we optimize for pleasant conversations instead of honest ones — we hurt our teams.

Read more [m.signalvnoise.com]

Andreas Creten, co-founder of madewithlove, wrote a good blogpost about a few aspects of their company culture.

There are three requirements for making good products: developers with the right skills, decent product management and ideal working conditions. The reason why so many of us wear headphones has to do with the latter. As a software developer, the last thing you want is distraction: colleagues talking to each other, the sound of a coffee machine, a printer and so on. Distraction prevents you from getting “in the zone”, a state of mind in which you deliver your best work.

https://medium.com/we-are-madewithlove/why-is-everybody-wearing-headphones-522a61de27ca

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Project failures is a WordPress blog with horror stories of project that have terribly gone wrong. I recently stumbled across this particularly juicy story.

A few years ago, I was hired to work as a consultant on a software project for a large French tech company. What I have witnessed there is beyond everything I could possibly have imagined in terms of software engineering. Far more serious than just a lack of professional competence was the utmost contempt for human dignity which at some point made me compare the whole experience to (what I imagine can be) jail. What I relate here is a selected list of topics that should illustrate my point, but check out by yourself.

https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-from-hell/

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Marty Cagan, who held jobs at eBay, AOL, Netscape and HP, describes the most important differences between good and bad product teams.

What I’ve learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. And I don’t mean minor differences. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to how the organization thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers.

http://svpg.com/good-product-team-bad-product-team/

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On the Tighten blog Samatha Geitz sums up the benefits of giving developers one day of "free" time a week.

About a year ago, Tighten officially implemented a "20% time" policy for its developers. This means that, on any given week, we only bill our clients for 32 hours of developer work; for the other 8 hours, developers can work on whatever projects they’d like to (as long as they can readily come up with an explanation of how it benefits the company in some way.) ... Here are some reasons that you may want to consider experimenting with a policy like this

https://blog.tighten.co/give-your-developers-20-percent-time

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Davey Shafik dissects the values of several tech communities in a new post on his blog.

Just like the programming languages that are the centers of our communities, each community has its own set of rules and idioms — they have a real life syntax.

In my (almost) three years of being in a developer relations type role I have attended events in several communities and have observed how they differ from my primary community (PHP). As I’ve tried to understand those differences and the reasons behind them, I have had many discussions with members of many more communities also.

After attending my first PyCon (US) I was struck by just how welcoming and diverse the community is and had many conversations trying to understand why this is. This is not what this post is about. This post is about conferences specifically, and how communities place different priorities on different things when it comes to how they run, organize, speak at, and attend events.

https://daveyshafik.com/archives/69985-the-syntax-of-tech-communities.html

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Yiannis Konstantakopoulos, a designer at Porcupine Colors, wrote an excellent piece on workaholism.

Workaholism is often confused with hard work. Some people who work on the Web seem not only to disregard its dangers, but to actively promote it. They see it as a badge of honor — but is it really? On the contrary, it’s a serious issue that can damage Web teams.

Before we get started, let’s make one thing clear: A “workaholic” is someone who is addicted to work, someone who is out of balance and out of control. Their addiction can make them work for 12, 14 or even more hours a day, every day. No weekends, no vacations, just work. Soon, they neglect their family, friends, health, sometimes damaging them all irrevocably.

https://medium.com/@porcupine/dealing-with-workaholism-on-web-teams-d6e156d82a08#.jyzawevsb

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Most outlets of technical information (whether high profile developers, companies, etc…) focus on architectural patterns and there’s never any talk about organizational patterns. In other words, does the architectural pattern that you choose fit your organizational pattern?

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A fun talk by Christin Gorman.

Join me for some ranting about how best practices from open source development and project management school is making your sustaining team miserable.

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