The Jira Guy’s Post

Developers: Turn feedback into your secret weapon! Learn how to gather, leverage, and incorporate client insights to win more projects and supercharge your career. Listen now for actionable tips on making feedback your path to success! #DevGrowth #CareerHacks https://lnkd.in/dT_n7eQK

Addressing challenges head-on is essential for any developer’s journey towards success. Here, I’ll delve into a few common hurdles and how I navigate them to ensure they don’t derail my progress. How do you navigate the above complex situations? Let’s discuss and share your thoughts. Source link

I lovingly refer to myself, a software support guy and once-in-a-while automations guy as the IT "ditch digger." I do the grunt work lots of others would rather not. I'm quite happy with this arrangement, but I remember the first time I referred to myself this way in front my senior on the SPO side. She looked at me with a bit of shock, like I had just horribly insulted myself. Her eyes said, "I can't believe you just said that." I giggled. Had I insulted myself? Maybe, but I don't really think so. You see, your streets, buildings, sidewalks, parking lots, parks, and *pretty much everything else* in town are kept from being destroyed by the natural flow of water for ONE SIMPLE REASON: proper drainage. ie: THE DITCH. When I was a kid, the lowest man on the construction totempole was the ditch digger, but he was still a guy who contributed important things. In tech, I'm the guy not QUITE at the bottom, but I am the wall between my devs / project managers and ALL of the support tickets that can be fixed without a developer / project manager doing the work themselves. The ditch digger builds the thing that keeps things flowing, keeps the big picture up and functional. In the same way, your support people keep the machine that's producing your big picture well-oiled and moving forward. That makes support not simply necessary ... but critical. It's an obvious thing, but I want to encourage anyone in support reading this to remember that what you do *matters*. Your service is important. It has incredible value in the bigger picture of your organization. Do not underestimate the impact you can have by serving well. Many aspire to be great and grasp at moving up the IT food chain. There's nothing entirely wrong with that, but I would suggest that moving up to where one's skills should place them comes naturally if one simply focuses on *serving well*. Do you want to be great? Don't bother trying to grasp at titles and momentary victories. Grasp at serving well instead and serve with your whole heart. Therein lies greatness, especially if the audience you're trying to please is the Lord. He will put you where you belong. Matthew 20:26

Ever wonder how some developers seem to effortlessly level up? A big secret is setting aside time to focus without interruptions. Imagine having three whole hours every day just to work on tough problems, learn something new, or code without anyone disturbing you. This kind of quiet, focused time is super important. It’s because all the little interruptions and distractions we get during the day can really slow us down. When you manage to get in the zone and stay there, you get a lot more done, and it even feels easier. So, here’s a tip from someone who’s seen it make a big difference: try blocking off a three-hour slot every day just for focused work. See how much more you can do and how it boosts your skills. Let's give it a try and see how quickly we can move up to the next level. hashtag I write about two topics: How effective global teams work and how individual developers can level up their game! Follow me on LinkedIn where I share insights, success guides, and conversations. #teamAwesome #techGrowth

🍪 Keep your beloved #legacy application; instead of starting over. I firmly believe in taking small, careful steps to update it, mainly for two big reasons: 👉 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗶𝘁𝘀: Start seeing positive changes from day one of the update. 👉 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗔𝗽𝗽 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗲: Retain the distinctive features of your app while incorporating new ideas from your users. Using the Strangler Fig Approach, a method coined by Martin Fowler has given me great results. We've moved from a stagnant state, where users were unhappy, to a place of growth and valuable feedback. This is a fantastic triple win! What I love about this method is its ease of initiation. You can quickly begin addressing the major problems. Remember, your legacy application isn't inherently bad; it's just certain parts of it that cause issues. There are many more reasons for this approach. You can read about what I learned as a CTO in my latest newsletter on my blog. And by the way, it's not as complicated as it sounds. It's important to understand that this isn't just a technical decision; we're making a business decision here. That makes it essential to tackle this as a company. Fellow #developer:   How do you define "legacy," and how do you deal with problems that arise from this condition? PS: This includes "𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗰𝘆-𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿-𝘀𝗶𝘅-𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵" codebases as well :) Have a great day, Adrian #softwareengineering ♻️ Hit that repost button to share with your fellows. 🔔 Follow me and ring that profile bell to keep you in the loop. 💻+🍪 Join my snackableCTO newsletter and catch my videos on Tech Culture. 🧑🏫 Find me on MentorCruise / AdrianStanek

To get promoted, you have to be the go-to resource on a product. You’ve got to be the expert. Until you are, you’re not moving up. This was my manager’s assessment during a performance review. “How will you know I’m an expert?” I asked. He shrugged, “When asked who the experts are, your name will come up.” It was clear this feedback had delayed promotions before. I smiled. It was a formidable challenge. I got to work. To be considered an expert, I needed visibility in responding to questions. It didn’t matter how much I knew if no one knew I knew it. At the time, there was a company-wide email distribution for technical questions. I decided to dominate that group. Despite thousands of members, only about 20 actively answered questions. There were around 50 questions a day, mostly repeated. Since Outlook’s search function was poor, people didn’t bother searching—they just asked anew. One responder would often reply, “Please search before posting your question,” which I found amusing. To solve this, I found a startup plugin called XOBNI, which made searching my inbox easy. I simply searched, cut, and pasted previous responses. The veteran responders thanked me for handling the grunt work. After a few months, I began receiving random calls from people across the world. They asked about things I didn’t know how to solve. I started calling the annoyed responder, who preferred phone calls to emails. He was directing people to me for common issues, only stepping in for truly tough problems. He thanked me for being his “lazy question filter.” This began a years-long informal mentorship where I learned what it meant to be an expert. He knew not just the system, but also its dependencies. Developers sent him beta builds, and product people consulted him on new features. He dedicated his professional life to this product. Before my next performance review, I documented the hundreds of questions I answered, the random IMs I'd get and shared stories of taking calls at 2 AM from around the world. The annoyed expert even wrote me a recommendation. My manager wasn't expecting this and although I didn’t get promoted in that round, I did shortly after.

4 very simple systems he used to keep him organized, motivated and productive! Link of the video is in the blog! I've been using the "The Inverted Pyramid Method" of staying motivated, organized and productive. It means that you start your day with the most complex and hardest tasks and work your way down throughout the day with simple less demanding and cognitive tasks. Start my day with writing code, doing code reviews and assigning tasks as a Lead Engineer at Hutsy and then work my way down to blogs, transcriptions and personal time! #detlinc #productivity #youtoblog

The pain points your team feels from operational challenges are often not the true source of the problem. They’re a symptom of a more significant problem. To identify that problem, you must speak with other teams and identify their pain points. That means having the time to talk with other team members and knowing which questions to ask. The other side of it is that many team members are focused on solving today’s problems, not positioning the organization for long-term success. Not every employee will be a visionary or think it’s worthwhile to talk about their problems. Working with an outside team who can help you move up a level or two and start having conversations with other teams to figure out their problems is very helpful. That’s hard to do from inside the organization. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. That’s where a partner like Quandary Consulting Group shines. This is what we do—all day, every day. Once you figure out the root cause of the problem, you can build more effective solutions. This is much more effective than trying to fix symptoms, and the impact on the organization (and the ROI) is much higher. #citizendevelopers #citizendevelopment #lcnc #lowcode #nocode #applicationdevelopment #development #artofthepossible

Is another software release 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 looming, with penalties on the horizon? Tackle the catastrophe head-on and 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭. But there's more you can do. From experience, I know that a set schedule can be a nightmare for both business stakeholders and tech teams. Managers seeking exact (the sooner, the better) timelines apply enormous pressure on developers. Developers say they need more details to estimate their work. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭? The development team underestimates tasks to please the managers but fails to deliver, deepening trust issues. This leads to burnout and a lack of job satisfaction. Managers end up promising new features to clients that need to materialize. The board and shareholders need to see the expected growth. Lay it all out on the table! 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. The sooner you straighten things out, the better. 𝐈𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐨? Of course! Identify the source of the problem: 👉An immature team? 👉A lack of domain understanding? 👉Business-tech communication issues? Still, what's causing the issue in your case? Contact me, and I'll help you find and fix it! #DevTeamExperience #BusinessCoders #GrowYourTeam

💻🚀 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐯𝐬. 𝐂𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬 – 𝐀 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐦𝐚 🚀💻 Ever had one of those days where you’ve made significant progress on a project, only to realize that a client's request for a new feature means redoing it all from scratch? 😅 It can be frustrating to see hours (or days) of work get reset. But here's the thing: 𝐈 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐦𝐲 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫. At the end of the day, what truly matters is delivering a solution that fits their needs and makes a real impact on their business. Growth isn’t just about writing perfect code. It's about adaptability, resilience, and commitment to creating the best experience for those we serve. 💪 Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation? How did you handle it? #ClientFirst #WebDevelopment #GrowthMindset #ProgrammingChallenges #KeepPushing