Wearing hats

My Hats hold Questions ¶

We all wear lots of hats; but I have a few that I wear more often than others (literally and metaphorically).

When I am wearing my Hat, I like to use them as a frame for my questions. I'm often channeling the persona of a great teacher, mentor, or coach that helped me; and thinking how I can guide my own or others goals.

👷 The Engineer ¶

When I wear this hat I roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I'm a full stack engineer and I enjoy working on the whole stack. I'm a polyglot and I enjoy learning new languages and frameworks.

When engineering I still have a customer focus. The first customers of my code are the other engineers that will have to maintain it.

I like to ask questions like:

• How can we make this code easier to understand?
• How can we make this code easier to maintain?

I also keep things lean; what works at Google and Facebook scale isn't what we need in our 8 person engineering team.

🧢 The Founder ¶

When I wear this hat I'm thinking about the business and how to make it better. I'm a firm believer in the Lean Startup methodology and I enjoy working with teams to help them build and ship products.

It's time to ask questions like:

• What is the problem we are trying to solve?
• What is the minimum viable product?
• What is the best way to validate our assumptions?
• How can we get to market faster?

I learnt early on that if a requirement cannot be verified or validated; then it's not a requirement. We need to look deeper and find the real problem.

Hold yourself accountable for your failures (measure these too!); make sure you communicate them to those around you, and learn from them.