Mike Swieton on Atomic Spin

Take Projects One Day at a Time, One Line at a Time

There’s no such thing as bad code. There’s just code that’s a poor fit for the problem today – but it probably was a good fit for the problem, knowledge, and timeframe it was writt

Development Practices

What Shape is Your Project? – Tackling Software with a High “Complexity to Visibility” Ratio

What "shape" is your project? It's not overall complexity that matters. It’s the ratio of complexity of functionality to visibility into that functionality.

Development Practices

Debugging a Complex Problem? Think Like an Epidemiologist

It's hard to know what's really going on inside your body, so researchers use the Bradford Hill Criteria to explore problems. Developers can use it too.

Managing Your Team

Want to Increase Your Custom Software ROI? Trust Your Team

If you don't trust your team enough to share the project's big picture goals, you'll never get their best work. True collaboration is built on trust.

Project & Team Management

Don’t Force Diverse Stakeholders into the Same Tools

I frequently see projects that want to run everything through the same tool. But different stakeholders need different levels of abstraction.

Project & Team Management

Sweat the Boring Details to Ensure a Smooth Project Start

The big picture keeps the team on track. But for the first few weeks, someone needs to sweat the details. Here are a few things to check before you begin.

Managing Your Team

Six Leadership Roles that Can Make or Break Your Software Project

Having the right leaders—including knowledgable, dedicated leaders on the client side—is essential to a successful software project.

DevOps & System Admin.

Livestream: “The Art & Craft of Secrets: Using the Cryptographic Toolbox”

This talk will review what the crypto tools are and how they fit together with our frameworks to provide trust and privacy for our applications.

Development Practices

Don’t Discount Problems You Haven’t Had Yet

If your last project didn't need any insurance, be happy odds fell in your favor. And keep using spikes, automation, etc. to keep your premiums paid up.

Development Practices

Retrospective: “Building a Virtual Appliance – Repeatably”

When we originally designed this, we made the assumption that by freezing the dependencies that we could, the possible changes would be isolated in lower-risk, more slowly moving c

Development Practices

Your Logs Should Be Considered Features, Too

Logging shouldn't be an afterthought. It's a core piece of diagnostic tooling. Logs are so cheap to integrate that they are often a high-ROI feature.

Development Practices

Tech Debt Isn’t What You Think It Is

We need to stop taking a sprint to "deal with tech debt," and start taking time to "implement the lessons we've learned over the past X sprints."

Mike Swieton

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