Surfing the Cloud

Leadership

A collection of 17 posts

Developers

Sisyphus and Continuous Delivery

Like Sisyphus, damned to push an enormous boulder up a hill each day only to watch it roll back down, those of us in the Technology industry are compelled with a similar burden

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

How Do You Measure a Good Software Engineer?

How do you know if you have somebody good at tech, or if they are just good at faking it? This is a frequent problem many tech managers are faced with. If you

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Effective Tech Meetings - Avoiding the Disaster

The format of your meeting, or how you run the discussion, is more important than you may think. With design and technology people, it is important that meetings and communication happen in a

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

The Importance of Empathy

Simon Sinek succinctly captures many leadership challenges faced today in his talk on Empathy and Perspective. This is an even greater challenge in the Technology Industry! A few points that resonate: 1:30

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

DBS: Powerful Agile Scoping

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a powerful tool to help scope work at any level – when used properly. But it is usually mis-understood (everybody does work breakdowns, right?); and perhaps because it

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Do you have good Tech Culture?

Work culture is far more critical to our success than work environment, yet it is more often glossed over because it deals with the problematic interpersonal challenges that are never easy to resolve. Have you considered the difference?

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Who does most of your work?

Price's law observes that from any given group, half of the work is done by a minor fraction of the whole (specifically 50% of the work is done by a square root of

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Designing Tech

Why Is Design So Hard?

Why do we struggle to figure the right way to build things? Even more so in the Tech industry? Design Thinking is a way of thinking that has powerful outcomes when it is

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
DevOps

Four Principles of DevOps

DevOps is a very charged word in the industry right now. There is a lot of information and opinions available and not everybody wants to go read several books just to get an

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

The Courage of being Different

We often hear about the challenge women face in STEM, but I wonder how much we really recognize what it is? I'm a male, in a field of men. Around me what is

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Remote Work Success!

From time to time situations may call for working remotely, but working remotely comes with its own challenges — on both the remote worker and the in-office workforce. Here are some suggestions for helping

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Developers

The Agile Deceit

Understanding Feature vs Deliverable Discord In software development, there is a challenge which, at its root, is about the difference between a feature (described from a user's perspective as something a user needs)

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Delegate with Success

Delegation is something we all want to do, yet we find it challenging. We recognize that we cannot do everything, but it is hard to pass off important things to others. Can we

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Fox in the Henhouse

There is a renown rivalry in Software Development as polarized as the Hatfield and McCoy's. As long as there has been software, there has existed two factions: the Developers, and the Administrators (also

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Designing Tech

The Power of Sustainment

I have come to appreciate a simple facet of Relationships called Sustainment. The concept is seemingly obvious, yet so often lost and forgotten. Simply put, one must always provide respect upwards to leadership,

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Designing Tech

Leadership Domains

Effective change can only be made with a solid understanding of your organization, and this involves understanding how people behave--these are defined as Leadership Domains and Behavioral Domains. There are three common domains

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
Leadership

Behavioral Domains

Just as leadership has three common domains, the same goes for how people within an organization tend to think and behave. These are the Behavioral Domains and are commonly described as: Operations, Engineering

Brandon Gillespie Brandon Gillespie
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