Short observations, useful details, and ideas that do not need a full article.
Culture is what happens in a team when no one is watching.
What people do. Culture is shaped not by values on a poster but by how people act in practice.
Honesty about mistakes. People can raise a problem or admit a mistake without fear of punishment.
Ownership. People do quality work not because someone is watching, but because they understand why the result matters.
Brooks’s law, an observation by Frederick Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
New team members need context, training, and time to become part of the team’s day-to-day communication. All of this takes time from the existing team, and many tasks cannot simply be divided among more people.
I’m launching tsymbal.dev as an engineering journal. I publish in-depth articles under Writing and keep shorter observations here.
If you can’t explain a decision briefly in terms of its constraints, those constraints probably haven’t been defined yet.