Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog

• Cool Stuff Week - Summary Posted Saturday, February 6, 2010 Dan Richards 0 Comments

  Cool stuff week came to a close yesterday - so was it a success?

  I guess it depends on how you define success, but by my standards it certainly was:

  1. We really did manage to work on things unrelated to our other active projects that we had been working on
  2. Everyone on the team thought it was a good idea and something they would want to do again
  3. We came out of it with several different ideas for future things we could do
  4. We tackled multiple new technologies - things we otherwise wouldn’t have been learning about.

  So, we get to go back to what we were previously working on and need to consider how we improve the next iteration of Cool Stuff Week.  One thing I think we can all benefit from was a bit more up front planning.  This will require a delicate balancing act as we don’t really want to over plan for these sessions, but perhaps just a little bit more planning would be a good thing.  As is often the case with software development, as we’re no exception, we managed to over estimate how much we could get done in a week!  I guess we’re pretty typical software developers.

  What made an impression on me more than anything was to see how engaged the team was and how much energy there was to work on these projects.  It’s that the team doesn’t normally work hard or isn’t interested in what they’re working on, but it drives home the point, that I think we lose track of sometimes, which is that new technologies get us engineers excited and our quest to overcome/master the technology is passionate and that is a great motivator for engineers.  The day-to-day grind of working out all the details is part of the job, but not particularly exciting so spicing our day-to-day up with time set aside for learning and using new technologies is critical to the engineering process.

  Another takeaway is to see the awesome ideas that are inside everyone’s head and imagination.  As the manager of the team, it has made me aware that perhaps my role and my ideas are driving the team more than is appropriate and I need to continue to find ways to get the team’s ideas out on the table and get them into the process.  People will work a lot harder on ideas they have come up with themselves…there is something very natural about that…how can we nurture that?

  Another learning is that a manager’s time isn’t as easily set aside as a developers’ - so I thought I’d have more time to spend on this than I did - just part of the role, but I thought I’d get to participate more than I was able to…oh well…My team was able to get that focus and that’s what really matters.

  So, Monday it is back to work on the stuff we had set aside, but we will come at with a fresh look, having learned some things we didn’t know a week ago and I expect with a bit more energy.  All of that is good, so yes, I think Cool Stuff Week (despite the name) was a success!

   

  The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms

  Share

  | More

  Tags

  Innovation • Software Development Process
  Next Post Previous Post

   

Comments +comment on this post

 

Add your comment below