A fascinating and powerful thing I learned years ago: humans aren’t very good at hearing the words “you should.” Those words send a loaded message to the recipient: “I know better than you do, and since you aren’t doing what I think you should, I think you’re ignorant.” We take it as an attack and react defensively, returning the volley with our assertion that we know the situation better than anyone, and give a litany of reasons why the suggestion won’t work. We walk away from the interaction feeling bruised, lessened, unsupported.
If user stories are a part of your process, you likely see them as an essential tool to help your team focus on the task at hand. Over the years, we have found that the activities that surround story writing are as important as the story itself.
Designers and developers have always labored to translate polished mockups into code. Designers manually annotate mockups and create detailed style guidelines, or learn to code CSS & HTML comps. Developers might need to spend time inspecting design source files. Not only is this time consuming, it’s also easy for subtle details to be mistranslated. Compounding the problem, teams often work on products that are continually iterated upon. Producing and maintaining design guidelines and translating designs takes valuable time away from focusing on customer development, design thinking and implementing new features.
Working at Lab Zero comes with many perks: adjustable standing desks with electric motors, tons of free food and drink, flexible schedules—and of course our annual trek to O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (#oscon). Attending this great conference allows our various project teams to gain insights from the open source community. It also serves as a good barometer of how our industry peers are utilizing many of the tools and technical approaches we use for our clients.
I teach a class on front-end web development basics at our local hackerspace, Noisebridge. It's a bit of a beginner-level class, and it'd be overwhelming to create a React and Redux app from the ground up, so I took our Lunch app and walked my students through the fundamentals.
I recently joined Lab Zero as a software developer. My friend Brien Wankel, one of their Principal Engineers, had been encouraging me to interview here for more than a year. I hesitated because, to put it bluntly: What’s so special about another boutique software development agency? There are hundreds—if not thousands—of them in the Bay Area. Plus, I was still trying to strike gold playing the startup equity game and I had already run my own boutique software development agency for a decade.
Trying to figure out how to containerize your Phoenix application for deployment? Check out our quick-start guide on Medium: Deploying Elixir and Phoenix Applications Using Docker and Exrm
Having recently moved into the dead center of the Financial District, we at Lab Zero have found ourselves awash with new culinary opportunities. As a social bunch that values the mid-day excursion away from our desks and out of the office setting, we’ve been almost overwhelmed with the amount of lunch options that surround our office. Call it a case of paradox of choice, where we would often end up grabbing a quick bite downstairs since we couldn’t even keep in mind all of the other restaurants out there. I know, life is hard.