Developer Tea
Developer Tea
Jonathan Cutrell
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence. With over 13 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell (@jcutrell), co-founder of Spec and Director of Engineering at PBS. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Twitter: @developertea :: Email: developertea@gmail.com
Taking Personal Accountability for Systematic Failures
"What actions can I take to get better from here?" This seems like a simple concept, but in practice we often are more interested in protecting our ego. In this episode we try to practice this self-accountability through an exercise.
Mar 8
14 min
Stat Series: What Statistical Measure Are You Overusing? (And What to Do About It), Part Two
In this episode we continue our discussion about the most overused statistical measurement. We'll talk about a few more counterintuitive properties of the average, and how you might be underserving your colleagues as a result of thinking in averages.
Mar 6
18 min
Stat Series: What Statistical Measure Are You Overusing? (And What to Do About It), Part One
On average, you're probably overusing this specific type of statistic. In today's episode, we discuss the king of all misleading numbers: averages! There's so much to talk about with averages that we're splitting this into two parts. Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician. But we will talk about some of the interesting properties of averages and why they are so addictive to use for humans, but more practically what counterintuitive ways we might be using them incorrectly. If you're using your sprint velocity to forecast work, this episode is for you!
Mar 1
18 min
Treat Your Time as A Product You Own
Today we explore the idea of treating your time as a product. Start with a wishlist: what do you wish was true about your week? What are your "if-only" statements? Next, put on your product owner hat. How would you improve the situation, if you knew the "consumer"'s requests? This exercise should provide unique insight and a new lens to view your time and agency through.
Feb 28
11 min
Von Restorff Isolation Effect and a Backfiring of Process
The Von Restorff effect says we remember things that stand out. This is probably mostly intuitive - "that stood out to me" is a common colloquialism. But what isn't intuitive is the implied downside of uniformity, which is often the product of process. In other words, if your process creates perfect uniformity, elevating any one thing, say, in priority, is going to be exceedingly difficult. Additionally, if your "escalation" process is overused, it will once again violate the point of the escalation in the first place. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent."
Feb 24
13 min
Perform a Career Premortem
In today's episode, we do a journaling exercise to provide a new lens on developing your own career roadmap. We're going to practice the power of hindsight, finding our wiser selves, and ultimately looking forward and backward...at the same time. It sounds a little odd, but it's all based in solid cognitive science. If you have a notoriously hard time figuring out your career path, I'd invite you to participate!
Feb 22
15 min
Delegation, Ownership, Responsibility, and Agency
As you grow your career, you will continuously lean on delegation to scale your efforts and focus on the most important things. True delegation requires ownership, and ownership can be thought of in two critical parts: agency and responsibility. In today's episode, we discuss the fool's errand of delegating only one or the other of these parts.
Feb 16
16 min
Apply Little's Law To What You Can Control
Little's Law explains, in a given queuing system, what the relationships of throughput within that system are. We can garner insights both for our work, and for our own lives, by recognizing how these relationships work and what we can do to utilize them. In this episode, we talk about when it is useful to use Little's law to your advantage.
Feb 3
12 min
Finding Leverage by Escaping Functional Fixedness
Finding leverage is difficult to do, but a lot of the reason for this is that we allow ourselves to fall into well-traveled cognitive pathways. If we reject the solution domain-set that comes to mind immediately, we may be able to consider options for solutions we had never considered. This larger solution set may also include a high-leverage option we had previously ignored.
Jan 26
12 min
Is it Actually Important to Question Assumptions?
In today's episode, we discuss turtles, resolutions, and why your beliefs and what you see as fact is probably worth questioning anyway.
Jan 16
9 min
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