Published: 02/16/2018
Most meetings suck. The person running them doesn’t actually run the meeting. They’re collections of random people unfocused, collectively wasting time for little or no purpose. How do we make meetings more effective and not waste time?
Published: 02/09/2018
I love retrospectives. They give the team a chance to reflect, to learn, and to really bond. Our retrospectives are the highlight of my sprint. I love doing them. Our format is quite different than you would expect from a typical scrum retro.
Published: 02/04/2018
Today, I just finished the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. I listened through Audible and I have to say it’s extremely remarkable in terms of how it affects my career thoughts.
Published: 01/22/2018
For my big rewrite project I’m working on, I decided it was time to start referencing modules by an alias instead of a relative or absolute path. It has a bunch of different modules, from the Redux store to an API service that almost every component or action consumed in some way. Figuring out the file path to the store or other common services was a chore.
Published: 01/11/2018
Today we’re going to look at Redux. Redux is a popular tool to use with React. We’re going to explore the topic and talk about why you should consider using it.
Published: 01/03/2018
It’s a new year and many of us will soon set then forget our new year’s resolutions. One of the challenges I have personally is to maintain a grateful and content attitude. In this field we get to experience some of the best perks of the modern life: the internet, building cool stuff, working for cool companies, and cool rewards like big paychecks.
Published: 12/20/2017
Your manager has asked you to review a stack of resumes and pick a couple candidates that you think are worthy of an interview. What do you do? How do you decide? When you get to interview people, what are the approaches you can take to do it effectively?
Published: 12/19/2017
Welcome to Pro Dev Mentor! I’m Adam Bourg. I’m a software engineer with more than a decade of technical experience. I’m currently working as a team lead building the future of TV. I am passionate about building and supporting Agile teams to deliver high quality software. As I began working in the field, I noticed the lack of software engineering professional development opportunities beyond how to work with the trendiest technology.
Published: 03/17/2017
Published: 03/17/2017
I’m a big fan of command line tools, I live by the command line, I do my job by the command line. I hate with a passionate fire, copying and pasting text. When I switched to Jekyll for my blog, I decided I needed a command line tool to generate the blog posts in the correct format so I can get layout, title and the correct file name structure.
Published: 03/16/2017
Welcome to my new blog running on github pages with Jekyll, Switching from Wordpress to this for the easier content management and no hosting feeds.
Published: 04/18/2016
My wife is a public school teacher, she teaches students who have special needs. She teaches a lot of students with learning disabilities and one thing she focuses with her students on a concept called “Growth Mindset”.
Published: 04/11/2016
One of the things that I feel is really missing from the JavaScript programming language is the option of private data and private behavior (methods) to an object. I never could get data that an outside caller couldn’t see. That is until I discovered the JavaScript closure.
Published: 02/09/2016
Over the last few months, I’ve gotten a TON of feedback from my post in November, “Scrum is the new waterfall”. Some of the feedback was good and others really thought my perspective is extremely negative.
Published: 02/01/2016
Published: 01/28/2016
I live and die by the keyboard. The keyboard is my friend and it’s way faster to use an application using a keyboard then it is to use a mouse. In fact there are many studies that show that for non-complex key combinations keyboard shortcuts and aliases are much faster then using the mouse.
Published: 01/25/2016
As software engineers we communicate far more then most people expect. We constantly communicate wether we write code, talk at standups or respond to emails. Professional communication is essential. Something that I have been working on for myself is improving my professional communication.
Published: 01/18/2016
I love working with the web, there is so much to know and learn about web development. Have you ever thought about the URL? I recently learned quite a bit about the URL. The URL is composed primarily of a few things:
Published: 01/14/2016
While I don’t blog the most consistently, certainly the holidays didn’t help. I have recently discovered that I really like writing, getting to express myself in the written form has been liberating. Listening to a guy like the Simple Programmer has inspired me to think of what I could do with my career through my blog. I could start my own training program for new programmers, I could tutor more and I could even speak at a conference. Honing my skills and grammar will allow me to write a book “some day soon”.
Published: 01/11/2016
A few months ago I decided I wanted to make a little bit of extra money on the side of my main job. I thought it would be nice to have a source of income that I could use to buy things like skis or bikes or other cool gear for my hobbies. I decided to start tutoring, teaching people about software engineering and how to build applications. Man did I meet a LOT of different people, from startup execs to doctors transitioning into the field to people who haven’t used a computer beyond facebook.