3 Tips to enhance you and your development team

Write teammates-oriented code

To write complex and innovative software products, you probably need to be more than just a single developer 🙇. In a little or large team the challenge of communication is pivotal, the soft skills are fundamental any more than the technical abilities.

Are those skills just about interpersonal relationships? I wonder if are those related to coding also. Projects often doesn’t have a good documentation, the indolence to create a project wiki lead to make heavier each new developer’s first month of work and so on and so forth.
Things are getting worst when codebase become legacy and not good comments are present. Likewise, a wall of text on a routine signature can be as much troubled in terms of maintainability and readability.

I like to refer to a series of suggestions as a “teammates oriented” coding.
What I’m saying now is about code style and S.O.L.I.D. principles with a special focus on the first one: “Single responsibility principle”, and the second one: “Open closed principle”.

Just look at a very tiny example of a builder:

.Net C# Builder example

This builder has a “fluently” extension, is designed to ensure a quick and immediate understanding of his usage. In fact, you can’t use the “Init” method after the “AddPlanet” or a “GetModel” that needs to be called as last instead otherwise, you’d have a compilation error.

The example is useful to emphasizing the following practices when your code, libraries or utilities may be used by others:

• Create dedicated public interfaces or classes as “integration points” while keep private their implementation details, avoiding usage errors.
• Guide the user (developer) to follow usage paths (using extension methods in case of C# as example).
• Using clever names for methods, but with short comments and only when they effectively need.
• Create modular builder and factories, focus on a single task for each method (single responsibility).

Moreover, you can use tests to create perfect use cases (Behavior Driven Development).

Complexity hiding can save your team to commit logic mistakes and promotes an easier interaction between his members. Make these practices a team standard.

Make personal doubts a team topic

Do the hardest thing for a technical person, be not technical at all! 🔥

In some cultures or traditions, men and women used to meet for a short or long time to discuss one’s own fears, doubts or desires. These meetings are meant to elaborate personal aspects perceived as weakness and to transform those to renewal and growth opportunities for the whole group.

In a very collaborative team, we are encouraged to do the same for a slightly different objective: Increase the team awareness.

I mean not just a code review meetups, you can also do it of course, but a more deep exchange of opinions and questions about projects, technologies or just situations and so on and so forth. It takes a little effort to get out of our comfort zone.

Birds meeting

In an ever-changing world, we are overwhelmed by facts, opinions, and technologies… Often the best choice from all of that is just impossible but, the right solution can arise as the most suitable with your teammates!

Drive technologies in your favor but don’t let them guide you (or your team).

You can literally write a distilled content of these meetings to review it later to notice the progress made in terms of personal growth and collaboration.

• Give a title and a time limit of each meetup
• Explore teammates feelings and what they prefer
• Talks about choices to do

Keep an hand written workbook

Ladies and Gentlemen: The “Online-Brain” — problem.

Internet got an immense impact in our society, you can grab new information at an unprecedented speed! This vast and ubiquitous online data begins to shift the way store and value knowledge itself. The available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in these areas of cognition, which may be reflected in changes in the brain.

The faster we can grab information, the worse we will store and value that.

That’s terrible news for our professional careers, but, also a nasty cat for the quality of life in a more general sense.

Business and deadlines push down ourselves and our development team, how many times you go at ”StackOverflow {dot} com” to grab a solution quickly as possible? If you often do, probably the most of the time you don’t remember these solutions, do you?

This because a “linked” memory has been created instead. Probably, you can remember how or where (which site of the World Wide Web) these good technical solutions are, but their details can be very clouded.

And if that’s not bad enough, now the entire world can fall on internet connection failure 💥.

But, we can face this vile enemy in two ways at least,

• Handwriting 📝
• Limit the access to these quick solutions providers ⏳

In addition to limit the access to StackOverflow like sites,
in according to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology research team, handwriting help you and your brain to be more open to learning:

“We found a specific activation pattern with handwriting that makes the brain open for learning. The activation pattern we found has in previous studies proved to be important for memory and encoding of new information. This activation pattern was not apparent when typewriting, showing that these two writing strategies are processed differently by the brain.” — Eva Ose Askvik, Researcher.

So, write a brief summary when a new solution was found during your daily activities, this will help you a lot to remember your work, the new information acquired and allow you to survive to a connection breakdown.

If you are ever on deadlines that justify a Google search for any problem to resolve quickly as possible, then, you probably have another kind of issue 😬!