It’s hard to hire amazing colleagues. It’s especially difficult to find great engineers and designers. As we wrote before, you can either steal great developers, or you can farm them. The combination of technical experience, quality communication skills, empathy, problem-solving, interest in mentoring/teaching, offbeat perspective, and professionalism is tough to…

Recently, we partnered with Code for America to help simplify the process for people to sign up for government food assistance, also known as “food stamps” or SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program). …

We published a document outlining how we work with our clients, what that looks like in more detail, and most importantly, why we do any of this in the first place. We call it The Cylinder Way and we’d like to know what you think of it. We shared this…

PREAMBLE: Please don’t call it “remote work”. It makes people who work outside of an office into an exception of the in-office norm. Consider saying “distributed work” or “work”. To learn more, see this excellent post from Chase Adams at Walmart Labs. We at Cylinder help achieve business goals using…

One of our client projects needed help with developer operations and infrastructure. The client had grown large enough to need a dedicated Ops specialist on staff who specialized in knowing how to configure servers and the like. This was good news for us. But this person was very busy, being…

One of our client projects needed help with developer operations and infrastructure. The client had grown large enough to need a dedicated Ops specialist on staff who specialized in knowing how to configure servers and the like. This was good news for us. But this person was very busy, being…

Great software engineers are amazing problem solvers with code and can get a crazy amount done. That’s what they’re paid to do. But if you become very skilled at writing code, you often get promoted. Great news, right? Maybe. The worst use of an engineering manager’s time is writing code…

To grow software development teams, you can either steal excellent developers or you can develop them internally. — Everyone tries to steal but few invest in farming new developers. Those who do have lower salary and recruiting costs, better learning cultures, and improved diversity. Here’s why you would set up an Apprenticeship program and how to do so. If you want help setting up a program like this…