Have you ever worked in a blame-focused culture? It's a toxic culture, to say the least. Searching for blame after a bug has shipped accomplishes little and promotes bad politics. A listener emailed me an article from Code As A Craft that talked about Blameless Postmortems. It's a great concept, and it accurately describes some of the better cultures I've worked in, though it has its downsides. In this episode, I deep dive into the various concepts.

Have you ever had to work with senior technical professional who didn't have a background as a developer? It can be a tricky relationship. In this show, I respond to a listener's email who'd recently been assigned to work with a solutions architect that didn't have a developer background.

Have you ever worked at a shop where you loved the coding aspect, but hated the culture? Maybe they were too concerned with ship dates, or overly preoccupied with architecture, or spent too much time chasing frameworks. When we find ourselves in these predicaments, we often strive to change those parts we don't like, typically with poor results. In this episode, I dig into that phenomenon.

The user's place in the software development has changed a lot in the last ten years. Way back when, the user was a faceless entity that we tended to avoid. Today, thanks in no small part to the Agile movement, users and user representatives are often key stakeholders from the beginning of the SLDC. In this episode, I dig into how I think the user fits into today's software development process.

Reputation. As programmers, we tend to hang most of our reputation on our coding abilities, if we even think about our reputations at all. As very technical people, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that reputation is for managers and other political game players. The truth is, however, that reputation is highly important, and ignoring that can have horrible consequences. In this episode, I give a cautionary tale of a programmer who didn't heed that lesson.

Gatekeepers, those IT professionals who become so possessive of their systems that they become more of a hindrance than anything else. In this episode, I talk about gatekeepers in the context of software development and how they lead to shadow IT efforts.

The ability to self-manage is one of those things that separates an average programmer from a senior developer, in my opinion. In this episode, I talk about the importance of being able to manage your own time and work and strategies for doing so.

Software development is only partially a technical skill. As your career progresses, your people skills become as important. This is true even if you're never put into a leadership role of any kind. In this episode, I cover three tools I've used to help with my people skills game: Non-confrontational language, tactical empathy, and open-ended statements.

Last week I talked about how I realized I no longer want to write code professionally. In this week's episode, I go into how I arrived at this point in my career and how tech turnover pushed me into thinking beyond just implementation.

The other day while sitting at my desk, I had a sudden realization: I don't want to write code professionally anymore. I still enjoy it as an intellectual challenge, but professionally I'm in a different place. In this episode, I dig into the topic and go over some honest truths I've realized recently.

A few episodes ago, I talked about the importance of communication skills for programmers. In this episode, I wanted to provide a real world follow up to a story I told in that episode in order to demonstrate how sideways things can go when we as software developers don't communicate well.

If you write software in the modern world, chances are that you rely on at least one or two external libraries. Depending on your specific style and type of programmer, you might rely on quite a few. In this episode, I talk about how so much of the industry is shifting to using libraries for things we used to write by hand, and the effects that shift is having.

When I first began my career as a programmer, the world of software development seemed like this endless realm of possibilities. Today, I feel like I'm in some sort of no-mans-land. I don't fit in with the under-30 crowd nor do I want to go into management. In this context, I've found myself asking, "Knowing what I know now, would I do this all over again?" In this episode, I explore that topic.

Have you ever wondered why it seems certain people in your organization have more success than you do, though you consider your work superior? In this episode, I talk about that very topic and how you can reframe the situation to better understand your organization's choices.

Communication in software development can be tricky. A miscommunication or misunderstanding can lead to hours or even days of wasted work. In this episode, I talk about my struggles with communication with users, managers, and other programmers, and hopefully lend some guidance for other programmers.

Career motivation for programmers can be difficult to maintain over the short-term, much less over a decades-long career. In this episode, I talk about the struggles I've had with career motivation, how what motivates me has changed for me over the years, and ways to keep up your motivation over time.

Every project has those aspects we'd rather avoid. Maybe it's front-end work, maybe it's database design, maybe it's writing tests. We avoid these things for reasons that are in my experience some version of "it's not fun". In this episode, I talk about why you should confront these aspects and improve your skills in those areas.

Our industry is one that has some interesting ideas about remote work and working from home. Few careers outside of software development get the opportunities for it that we do. I've done a fair bit of it myself, and in this episode, I talk about working from home and remote work.

We're all leaders to some degree. Even if your job title doesn't have words like "manager", "architect", or "senior", you're still every week presented with opportunities to display good or bad leadership traits. These traits can have an especially outsize effect on junior developers. In this episode, I go over the importance of honing your leadership skills.

If you haven't encountered a programmer who's dogmatic about some aspect of their work, you will. Dealing with these software developers can be very trying. In this episode, I explore the topic and give some pointers on how to identify and deal with them.