Based on Michael Ferguson, CEO of Rainmakers, asserted that managers must “Stop Neglecting Remote Workers”

Key Quote

“There’s no magic tool for making sure your relationships with remote employees are as strong as they can be. Making a good effort requires being equally conscious of them and understanding the challenges they face. It means trying to replicate the experience of having them physically present with you. The more actions you take to show that you consider them full members of your team, the more likely they are to feel and act that way.”

Our Key Takeaways

When discussing the need to foster better relationships with employees, remote workers — and employees located in satellite offices — can find themselves overlooked. In his article, Ferguson leverages his experience to offer best practices for including and engaging a dispersed…

Based on Jared Lindzon, a Toronto-based journalist, recently outlined “How to Make Your Remote Workforce Feel Appreciated”.

Key Quote

“Feeling valued and appreciated is not only desired by people, but it’s critical to the function of the organization. Businesses with team members who feel valued and appreciated are more profitable, there’s less conflict, and they get higher customer ratings.”

Our Key Takeaways

Advances in technology have catalyzed the growth of the dispersed workforce and, though many employers might assume that their remote workers are automatically content, they must make a conscious effort to engage and include these often-overlooked team members.

Simple recognition of a job well done can drive employee productivity and positive sentiment among remote and in-house staff alike; however, psychologist Dr. John White has found that remote staff place more emphasis on quality time with their colleagues than their on-site counterparts. …

What if you want to self-correct the temperature in your office? Or what if you are curious to understand your office environment using IoT sensors?

If this sounds interesting to you, please read on.

To begin with, we need to set up a temperature reading sensor. We connect it to an Arduino which connects to a RaspberryPi.

The next step is to set up AWS IoT SDK on your Raspberry Pi.

Setup the Thing

1. Create a thing in AWS IoT:

The main and very old lesson: don’t start a business with people you don’t trust and know well.

November 2014. I sold my 50% partnership in an online cosmetics company for 1000 EUR after I rejected 1M EUR investment in it.

Why would you ask I rejected 1M EUR investment? Please read on to find out.

2013. My friend Yan introduced me to 2 Israeli guys who were making excellent cosmetics. They were selling via partnerships in a few countries. They were eager to go online but didn’t have knowledge and expertise to make it happen.

2014, February. We decided to join our forces to make a global company to sell cosmetics online. We split 50/50 and agreed that I do the main work. …

TL;DR; Find the job, get obsessed, get an offer, begin the journey.

Before you consider a job in any company, big or small, you need to make clear for yourself what you really want in your personal and professional life. Understand what you are valuing and what expectations you’ve got from your future employee. I need to be true to yourself on why you are changing the job and why not to try and improve the existing one. Please have all “Whys” answered.

It may be even one of those prominent ones like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook or Microsoft (including GitHub and LinkedIn). It does not really matter for me. The only assumptions I am making are that it is extremely hard to get into a company and the bar is pretty high as well.

There is a prerequisite to joining a company — you have to really want to join that gang of people. You must be obsessed about joining. This is the secret nobody tells you :) That it! …

Who is an end-to-end software engineer?

The end-to-end software engineer is a software engineer who can take an idea and make a successful business out of it. From the definition, it is clear that it is not for everybody and many people will have some specializations and gaps in skills. And it is normal.

Why?

The more well-rounded end to end engineer you are the easier to make a living by:

• making your own company/product/business
• joining a small company that values and needs generalists
• be a consultant that strives in the intersection of particular areas
• emphasize with and understand much better your colleagues, so that you can make yours and their job…

Problem: I want to run Jest tests on CircleCI. I have got many tests and I am on the free tier of CircleCI. Why is it a problem? Because Jest runs tests in parallel and I got “Out of memory” from CircleCI.

Solution: Add maxWorkers parameter to Jest.

-- --maxWorkers=4

Bonus #1: To get code coverage report from Jest

-- --coverage

Bonus #2: To fail Jest run when the first test fails

-- --bail

Bonus #3: To flush AWS Gateway API authorizer

aws apigateway flush-stage-authorizers-cache --rest-api-id ${apiId} --stage-name ${stage}

TL;DR; Here I compiled a list of possible retrospectives improvements. I challenge you to share your experience in the comments. OK. The list is a bit bigger than 42. Enjoy this 57 retrospective improvements.

A retrospective is a meeting to improve processes in your team. It should happen in any team, not only software development team using Scrum. Embrace it!

Here are things you and your team could use to improve retrospectives:
1. Prepare and plan well (data, place, team)
2. Get the correct people in. It is beneficial if everybody in the team attends it, but it may not always happen.
3. Start the conversation by reviewing the actions from the previous retrospectives
4. Get the unbiased input by asking people prepare their data or evidence
5. Timebox every section of a retrospective meeting.
6. Don’t use anonymous item creation. Every item should have an owner.
7. Split into positive and negative items.
8. Make a retro-battle — ask people to take randomly a particular side and fight for it… It is fun, I promise you!
9. Group related items on the board to have fewer items to talk about. If you can make 1 it is amazing!
10. Ask the owner of every issue to highlight what happened, but not how to fix it or why it happened.
11. Vote on the items in real time. Everybody has a restricted amount of voting.
12. Sort item by votes. Imaging your meeting get suddenly stopped and you should be able to get out of it anyways.
13. Select items to discuss in more detail and let the owner(s) drive the conversation.
14. Be blameless.
15. Propose actions for every important item.
16. Every voted item must have an action, even if it is a positive one. An action can be a short blog post or something else to increase team visibility.
17. If there are many actions you could vote to decide which one to tackle.
18. Select an accountable person for each action. Let him drive the execution.
19. Use issue trackers like Jira, Trello, Asana to track the progress of all actions.
20. Add actions to the sprint or Kanban backlog otherwise you may not do them. Make them part of your routine work.
21. Set the deadlines for actions.
22. Create a actions summary that you will review during the next retrospectives, so you have what to do in point 3.
23. Actions from the retrospectives need estimates, planning, cooperation as other stories.
24. Change the retrospectives facilitator. Time to time or every time to increase team cooperation.
25. Use high-quality equipment if you have remote team members.
26. Use asynchronous retrospectives if you have a distributed team without a time overlap.
27. Record video from your retro for future references or for people who could not make it.
28. Do them timely. It is a good cadence to do them every sprint, but many teams do them monthly.
29. Do them more often if your team is new. If your team is morphing often or many people join every few months. It makes sense to have a short retro before the sprint to review a few previous retrospectives. It will help new team members to ramp up faster.
30. Create next retrospectives artefacts after you finish the current one. It will help people to note the input down and they don’t forget it. Please don’t postpone noting down impediments till the meeting itself.
31. Invite random people from your organization. The experts who you believe can improve processes. Like experts in Design Sprints.
32. Attend retros of others to gain knowledge how they do them.
33. Count the cost of it. Many people are in, so you can do simple math. It can be more effective to volunteer this time :)
34. As any other meeting, don’t hesitate to finish it earlier if you can.
35. If some things need a discussion with a subset of the team, take it offline and do it afterwards.
36. Make a retrospectives burn-down chart which compares progress over the last few meetings. 5 to begin with.
37. Measure happiness factor and watch it over time.
38. Use feedback cycle to improve the effectiveness of retrospectives.
39. Make it optional and see who comes, find out why people didn’t attend.
40. Celebrate failure every month. And give away prices for sharing the biggest failures and lessons learnt.
41. Introduce Ironman trophies. For example, for solving the most customer impactful story, improving a process etc.
42. Once in a while do retrospective for retrospective meetings (can be a smaller team and less often).
43. Set focus for your actions.
44. Introduce a black secret box (the real is better, online is possible). If they don’t want to share it during the meeting their can provide feedback about retrospectives and past iterations. What if they don’t care enough?
45. Go outside to a park or other office (make something like an offside).
46. Make walking retrospectives if your team is small enough. Many people think better on the feet.
47. Bring some nice food and make a celebration out of retrospectives. I am sure you will find what to celebrate. RIP bad mood.
48. Use tools that facilitate collaboration. Something like Trello will do.
49. Be obsessed about improving.
50. Shut up! Yes, listen please!
51. Take 3–5 minutes at the beginning of the retrospectives to do a mindfulness practice. It will increase concentration and leave other things behind the doors.
52. Don’t let anybody into the room after the meeting has started. Finish on time as well.
53. Think how can you improve 10X at least.
54. Blog about retrospectives, actions and achievements to increase team and organisational transparency.
55. Create a team play for effective retrospectives and share it with other teams.
56. Introduce a “Retro-prize” in your company for the most actionable teams in relation to retrospectives.
57. …