Not too long ago, I was asked during a job interview “how do you convince your teammates that you’re right?” I answered with probably the most surprising answer: “I don’t.” It’s taken me years to realize that being right isn’t terribly important. Especially when there’s more than one right answer — which there usually is. It’s more important to work as a team. It’s more important to be respected and to have respect for others. ...

I recently attended an Open Space hosted at work. I’d never been to an Open Space, and didn’t know what to expect. We’d been told that this was a workshop to help Engineering Managers (my role), Product Owners, and Product Analysts find better ways of working together. But due to the way an Open Space works, it evolved into something completely different — and better. We’d brought in Diana Larsen to facilitate the Open Space. Diana is a stalwart of the Agile community, focusing on how people and teams interact. She literally (co-)wrote the book on Agile retrospectives. Diana was also kind enough to be our guest at an Agile LINC meetup later in the evening. ...

I’ve written up a list of career-related resolutions the past few years. I’ve been pretty successful meeting those goals, so I’m going to continue the tradition. Coding I want to increase the Open Source code I write this year. That’s basically everything I write that’s not directly related to work. I took over maintenance of Virtus late last year, but haven’t done a good job at finding the time for that. That’s probably more responding to issues on GitHub and merging pull requests. But eventually, I’ll likely add some features and do some refactoring. ...

I held a retrospective with my new team last week. The team includes 2 senior developers, 2 junior developers, a product owner, and a product analyst. I’ve joined the team as an engineering manager, which I think of more as a team lead with an elevated title. Being new to this group, I wanted a way to understand their values. What motivates them? What common values do we share that we can leverage to move forward in the same direction? ...

It’s that time of year again — time for a retrospective on how I did on my goals for the year. I had 5 main goals for 2015: Job Hunting Conferences Blogging Programming Language Design Writing an Agile Book Job Hunting I got pretty lucky on this one. My main contract with Mercy got extended several times. Amos and I must have been doing a good job of keeping the customer happy. We even made it through a couple rounds of layoffs. I’m wrapping up the gig at Mercy now. I’m working one day a week there, as the project winds down. ...

I’ve always been someone who faces my fears. I have a moderate case of arachnophobia. I don’t run away when I see a spider, but it creeps my out when one is crawling on me. When I was in college, I decided to buy a tarantula to attempt to get over my irrational fear of spiders. I thought I’d be able to get more comfortable with the tarantula over time, eventually to the point of letting it crawl on my arm. It didn’t work. Although I did find that my fear of tarantulas is rational — I got a terrible case of hives just from touching the urticating hairs that fell off into its water sponge. ...

I’ve been on vacation the past week, in Cozumel, Mexico. One day, we went on an excursion called Xenotes. A cenote (say-NO-tay) is a sinkhole filled with fresh water. (The “X” is to give it a more Mayan-sounding trademarkable name.) We had a lot of fun swimming, kayaking, and zip-lining. A bilingual tour guide led our group, which consisted of people from across the US and South America, of various ages and physical abilities. ...

I got my first computer in 1984. It was a Commodore 64. I had to do extra chores and save up my allowance to buy it. I was 13. Back then, Sears and other retail stores had Commodore 64 computers out on display. Whenever I went to the store, I’d write a short BASIC program and leave it running on the display computers: 10 PRINT "CRAIG IS GREAT!" 20 GOTO 10 Hey, I was a 13-year-old kid. Later, I got a little more sophisticated. I’d change the background color instead. I still remember the POKE address: ...

I’m wrapping up my current consulting gig at Mercy in December, and starting a new gig at CenturyLink. I’m a software developer, but that’s only a part of what I do. What I really do is join a team and help them improve the way they work — both their processes and their technical skills. I think this is a key differentiator for me as a consultant. Most consultants (and Agile coaches) come in and tell people what to do. I don’t like to just tell people what to do. I’d much prefer to work side-by-side with them, getting a better understanding of what their challenges are. Once I have a better understanding of the challenges, I’m able to better brainstorm some ideas to try. Then we can experiment to see what will work and what won’t. ...

I facilitated a retrospective today; it was one of the best retros I’ve ever been involved with. I figured out what activities I wanted to do earlier in the morning. They were really quite simple. I wanted to focus on happiness. How happy are you at work? I started with two questions that I’ve used with teams before, to some success (although not so successful for one particular team). The first question I asked was “How happy are you at work?” I had them put a rating from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning they should have quit last week, and 10 meaning they couldn’t imaging being happier at work. ...