Team-Driven Developer

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

“Does it scale?”

This is a frequent and familiar question in the software world these days. In the world of SaaS and the ability for software users to ramp quickly, we all want to make sure our software scales.

But beyond just scaling software, I want to consider a different function that also needs to scale:

Your engineering team.

Scaling your team is non-trivial (probably harder than scaling software!), yet we often look to the same solution of horizontally scaling our teams.

While horizontal scaling is indeed important, I think there are some tools we can use to "vertically" scale first before adding new teammates.

Vertically Scaling Your Team

Team-Building Exercise

We've discussed this before, but it's such a crucial tool to your team's success: where can you find more capacity? Are there meetings to remove or modify? Are there too many projects going on? Could you remove tests (gasp!) from your CI pipeline that re-test the same core logic?

Besides the ideas in the article, one tool I'd invite you to consider is AI.

I know everyone is talking about AI, but the truth is we need to learn to adapt to it. Ignoring and scoffing at it won't make it go away.

Learn to increase your capacity (and, therefore, your team's) by using AI in your workflow. I personally use AI to help write boilerplate test setup code, trivial grouping logic, and understanding framework calls.

AI is a lever that can help you and your team move work you otherwise would have struggled to move if you use it properly.

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

Scaling Your Team