Team-Driven Developer

A newsletter with tips and tools for building software as a team

In one of my first software internships, I remember overhearing a conversation between two engineers.

I don’t remember much of the details, except that this one engineer was pretty frustrated with another about some recent code that was checked in. His last line was “Let’s be consistent.” as he walked back to his own cubicle, clearly agitated.

For some reason, this conversation stuck with me. I carried it through my first few professional years as an engineer. I wanted to write consistent, clear, crisp code.

It felt like an unspoken rule that great codebases were consistent with no exceptions.

As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve realized that while consistency is a good goal in software development, it isn’t the goal.

Let me explain why.

Consistency Isn' the Goal

Team-Building Exercise

This week, there isn't an Exercise that pertains directly to the article above, but I do think it's one to practice.

This week, I want to encourage you to do something very uncomfortable that I'm learning to practice myself:

Get more face time with people on your team that you disagree with.

And by face time, I mean at least some form of video-on conference call - not just Slack or an audio-only interaction.

Why? Research from Zoom suggests trust is achieved simply by both parties having their camera on. And increasing trust with those that disagree with you is a key part of improving your team's ability to work together.

It's so easy to go from a disagreement to a conflict to an argument to ultimately not trusting a teammate. And that is a dangerous place to be.

Even when we disagree, we must find ways to continue working together productively. Find common ground, work to resolve the issues you can, and be willing to let go of a few that don't matter that much in the long run.

It's simple in theory, hard to do in practice, but worth it.

Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!

Code Review Champion - My book on code reviews will help you become a world-class code reviewer. From giving kind feedback to navigating conflict, this book can help anyone wanting to sharpen their code review skills.
Questions for Devs - Building a team takes more than catching up about your weekend at standup. I've used these questions to build relationships with my team and push past the same old surface-level conversations.
Pull Request Template - Maximize your efforts in pull requests by giving context right at the beginning of a new pull request. Copy and paste this template into your repo, and voilà!
Code Review Metrics - Start measuring how your team tracks against a few common code review metrics. This python script will pull your GitHub pull requests and generate a CSV you can slice-n-dice to get the data you want. It also has graphs! As this is an open-source project, your contributions and feedback would be great!

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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Consistency Isn't the Goal