Connell

I wrote a post on Meta Stack Exchange as part of the "How I Work" series. I detail my day-to-day work at Stack Overflow and the challenges we face.

This is a story about how our team at Stack Overflow split out a small feature from a monolithic application into its own microservice. We moved the data to a new database, rebuilt the UI as a microfrontend using a new framework, and managed to deploy it without any downtime.

Some places "do agile" because it's the cool trendy thing that tech companies do nowadays. Their teams are usually mandated to do Scrum, which they take to mean two-week cycles with 2-3 hours of stand-up meetings, maybe 4 hours of refinement, 1-2 hours retro, another hour of sprint planning, another to demo, another higher-level roadmap meeting. That's 10 hours of meetings even before you include all the ones you "took offline".

I talk about my path to software development via text-based RPGs, my work on Stack Overflow’s Community Enablement team, why Agile gets so much hate, and what I've learned giving conference talks to developers.

Great engineers truly care about what it is they're building. Not just the end result, making a customer happy and getting paid. They enjoy the engineering process, they love the tools they use, and they get a kick out of the job itself.