Team-Driven Developer

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

Software companies love to talk about innovation.

Whether they are building a product that will “revolutionize the way teams do X” or plan to “disrupt the market”, there is real value in convincing investors that a company is doing something unique and innovative.

You’ll also see this idea on job postings or in advice on how to grow your career. "To get to the next level, you must innovate, challenge the status quo, and bring new ideas to your teams."

But we’ve also heard the tried-and-true adage, “Don’t reinvent the wheel” or “Don’t forget the basics.”

How can you reconcile these two ideas as you chart a course for growth in your career?

In my experience, this comes down to learning that innovation is just like many software architectures: it’s built in layers.

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Team-Building Exercise

This week's Team-Building Exercise is around innovating for your team's daily work.

We've done similar exercises like this before around Developer Experience. But this time, shoot for the moon:

What products could your team help introduce to improve revenue?
In what ways could your team save on cost for your software?
Is there anything truly new your team might consider building that could be open-sourced?
Are there other innovations you know about across working groups or from conferences that your team should prototype or look into?

Don't wait for a retro on this either - start a message thread with an idea you've come up with and get feedback from your team. I've been amazed at how many ideas have been created on my current team from someone saying, "Hey, I was thinking about X and had this idea...."

Part of innovating is having the courage to ask questions and share your ideas.

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

Layers of Innovation