Tracking Your Time
I’ve been using a time tracking tool pretty consistently for the last year to categorize all of my time spent at work. It started with wondering how much tim...
Recent Posts
Two (more) Weeks in QA
Due to our regular QA engineer being out on vacation, I once again has the opportunity to do a tour of duty in QA. This time, for a big mobile release. I pre...
Saying the Same Thing Multiple Times
To communicate something to an organization of people, you need to repeat yourself. The more people involved, the more you will need to repeat yourself if yo...
Estimating Epic Stories in Three Steps
In Agile, an Epic story is a potentially large placeholder story in the backlog. Typically they will be broken down into manageable stories during grooming b...
Trading off Value, Quality and Time
The traditional Iron Triangle tries to explain in graphical form how software projects need to make hard tradeoffs between scope, schedule and resources.
React Native Six Months In
NerdWallet released our first cross platform mobile app at the start of 2017, about six months ago. We choose to use React Native, and we are still using 99%...
Minimizing Impact of Interruptions on Engineers
Any software engineer knows the feeling of being “in the flow”, or “in the zone”. It’s when you get a large block of uninterrupted time to just code. These p...
Best Practices for Meetings
Every team meeting needs a primary owner. If you are the owner of the meeting, it’s your responsibility to make sure that this is a great use of team time.
Getting Started with AWS Device Farm and Python Appium
AWS Device Farm is a service for running mobile app integration tests against a suite of physical devices. The Amazon documentation is exhaustive, and they s...
Long Term Software Estimates
False scheduling to match a patron’s desired date is more common in our discipline than elsewhere in engineering because it is VERY DIFFICULT to make a vi...