Author: Matt
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State of Work Survey, June 2020 – Results!
After holding the survey open a bit longer than planned plus a few delays in data collection, I’m excited to share the results of the State of Work Survey for June 2020. To everyone who provided input, thank you. I’m not going to restate the entire report here. I’ll give a few topline findings. For…
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State of Work Survey, June 2020
As anyone reading this in real-time knows, the world has looked different to most of us for the past couple of months. I’m curious what that means to everyone. For me, I started working for a pure-remote company last August, so I had very few work-related changes. On the other hand, I experienced social and…
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Retrospective on a Database Replacement
[This article was originally posted in 2020 on the now-gone Digital Solutions blog.] Swapping out the database layer of an application is rarely easy. It’s even less easy when you’re also changing the storage paradigm (say, from a document database to a relational database). It’s even less easy when you run into peripheral snags. But…
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Processes Through an Outcome Lens
[This article was originally posted in 2019 on the now-gone Digital Solutions blog.] Processes are vital to modern organizations. Imagine you were asked to help improve an organization, and found that it had zero defined processes. You’d almost certainly start by implementing a process or two, then by wondering how in the world they got…
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The Policy Pendulum
I’ve been thinking a lot about policies lately. About how they’re sometimes necessary and sometimes not. About don’t scar on the first cut and about how organizational scar tissue can spread to cover related areas of the organization. I’ve been thinking about the freedom of young companies with no policies, and about the freedom of…
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Running a Decent Intern Program
“The new intern shows up next week.” You feel excited and ready for that, right? I don’t know about most companies. I’m guessing most people are happy to have an extra worker around. And most probably don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with their new intern. Want to know what to do? Yeah,…
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Resources for Transitioning to Agile
One of my former interns, an excellent engineer, is working at a company that is transitioning to agile. He asked for some readings and resources I’d recommend. This got a bit longer than a few links, so I decided to turn it into an article instead of a direct message. Without further ado, my recommended…