What are the common ingredients of great team cultures?

We all have an idea of what a great team culture might look like. Few of us might even know what that feels like.

This is a book that looks at the best team cultures and exposes the group behaviors with the most impact on the results they obtain. Turns out, people like to people feel safe, appreciated, and with a clear purpose to strive for.

1 — The key for team performance is not so much the skills of individual players, but the quality of the interactions between them.

A…

Two trends are becoming increasingly apparent in the software development world.

• It is becoming easier by the day to build a software product.
• The number of people in search of ideas for those software products is increasing.

With the advent of no-code solutions and the hacker/maker movement, we, more than ever, are recognizing the power of being able to idealize, build, and ship a product that can impact more people than ever in history.

Having a CS degree or knowing a programming language is becoming less of a factor in what you can accomplish with software, so it’s only natural…

Talking with Your Manager, Fast and Slow

In the omnipresent tome of wisdom that is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, we are presented with two modes of thinking. Making my best effort to not murder with simplification the life’s work of a Nobel laureate, it works like this: without noticing, we are either employing System 1, the fast talker, intuitive, sensitive and generator of impressions, or System 2, the calculating, careful, logic lover, and validator of impressions. System 1 is eager to help, System 2 is lazy. If you think this explains a lot about too many things, I know the feeling.

Now, let’s do a…

Code reviews are the gift that keeps on giving. Even after you go through them with your colleagues, the potential for further discoveries is undervalued.

The other day I was checking some comments on a pull request and I found something along the lines of:

“this” is not needed here.

and this was the Java keyword. In that part of the code it was being used to assign a mock to a test class variable. Something like:

And you know what, the comment was 100% right. The test runs as expected, but we don’t need this in this case.

An atomic explanation of what’s the Java this keyword

…

Money was never the purpose. I was in the mood for an experiment, though. I like making bets on something where I can never lose. Those are the best kind of bets. Writing an article and putting it on Medium Partner Program is one of those bets.

What’s, literally, the worst that can happen?

I’ll tell you. These 4 things happen:

• You get a little better at writing;
• You get a better idea of what people like to read;
• You earn $0;
• You spend 1 to 4 hours of your time;

Can you live with these consequences?

Here’s how three articles just made my month

Software developers don’t agree on a lot of things. You have infinite fertile ground for debate around programming languages, IDEs, frameworks, operative systems, libraries, patterns, best practices, or counter variable names. What we all do agree on is that we hate wasting time on code that won’t bring any measurable benefit, or worse, will be deleted in two weeks. With experience, we become pretty good at sniffing that code out from a distance — it’s our responsibility to always steer the work we do into meaningful territory.

When we tackle our programming side projects we tend to have a higher…

Will you start building one of these?

This is part two of my Side Projects Trilogy. On part one, I talked about How to Choose your Next Side Project so that chances of getting the most out of your side project mount on your favor.

On part three, we conclude this trilogy with a collection of tips and strategies to increase your chances of getting the most out of your side projects.

Without further ado, here’s a collection of hand-picked side project ideas, inspired by other articles before this, my experience, and what I’ve been reflecting on what makes a…

If you are reading this article, I’m willing to bet you have also read your fair share of “side project ideas” posts. I also love going through those, curious as I am, in search of some magical spark, some rabbit hole to lose myself in with abandon for a couple of months.

Well, this is not that kind of post. Not in isolation, at least. This will be a trilogy of articles about side projects and rest assured, part II is already here, with a list of 12 fun side projects that people will want to use.

And on part…