Start today! All you need is a bit of time and discipline. — I am an avid side project-er. At any point in time I always have at least one “thing” going on in the background that feeds my appetite for playing with new tech and learning new stuff. Side projects can be liberating and super fun. They are great for your career…

BY GRANT AMMONS Recently I started a weekend project called Todolist, which is a little Go application for the command line that does simple task management. Todolist is centered around due dates, and I needed a good way to unit test my code. …

QA 101: Defining the terms, what works, and who does what — BY GRANT AMMONS When it comes to software, the term “QA” itself is highly loaded. Because what is it, really? Is it just a thing at the end of the software delivery line, where quality gets lovingly sprayed on at the end, achieving a nice glossy sheen? Is it a…

BY GRANT AMMONS Retiring features is a critical part of product management. It takes guts and discipline to do it, but it is critically important to the overall health and success of your product. If you let too many features creep into your product, the core value proposition and vision…

BY GRANT AMMONS A major goal you should have as an technical leader is to help grow the abilities of your team. In order to do this, you need to deliberately cut your engineers’ time away from doing their actual work to focus on learning. On purpose. …

“Ok, so we launched our new feature last night. However we have 30 customer emails from last night about bugs, and we need to hit those right away. Also the error rate is a little spikey, which probably means there’s more issues, and our response time is up a few…

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Why? Because the first principle of the Agile Manifesto is so easy to break. We broke it big time, and we learned a lot when fixing it. Tools like Jira seduce you into building a mammoth process that is convoluted and hard to…

BY GRANT AMMONS The following is a story about how we matured as an engineering team. We went from an ad-hoc process to Scrum, and used Scrum for a whole year. Scrum leveled us up as a team in terms of structure and process. But it caused major morale issues…

At PipelineDeals we have an engineering manifesto. Our manifesto is the backbone of what we stand for as a team. They are high level, core underpinnings of our team’s culture. They read like team-level objectives, but they trancend any time-based measurement. They are here for the life of the company. …