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Last week, I was at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress, the biggest conference I’ve been giving a tech talk.

With more than 12k attendees, 300 speakers, and ~10 tracks in parallel, I was invited to give not one but two talks. One is about my experience with Extreme Programming and the profound benefits of embracing change in your work and life.

It is hard sometimes to get to bed with the mind blank because, more often than not, I think about my next reading, learning, talk, or what I will write this or next month.

Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive beyond their control.

This will be controversial, but let’s talk about the QA position. The hidden truth behind the lack of software quality and why this should concern you if you write software.

To introduce a new tech stack for the entire team, it’s important to bring “why?” and a strategy to make it happen among the team because it will affect everyone.

I’ve got this question recently, a couple of times, and this is a great topic to share.

As business scales, the leaders’ primary focus must shift from customers to employees. Therefore, I would like to share what I consider critical points that any leader should address and focus on regularly.

For each key point, you will have book recommendations that go deeper into the matter, giving you references from real experts behind them.

My interview with devm.io regarding Agile and Extreme Programming.

Talking to a friend about agile, he asked me a fascinating question remarking how badly sometimes Agile and Scrum fit together, especially regarding meetings. These are my thoughts about this topic.

Let’s assume you already know what the agile manifesto is. Let’s consider that you apply most of the “extreme programming” values, principles, and practices. How can you work with other teams that aren’t agile?

I recently got a great question on Twitter which got me thinking for a while and I decided to share my thoughts about it.

Leadership is not a synonym for management, it has nothing to do with titles or personal attributes. So, what is it? How can we become leaders? And most importantly, why?

One of the most complicated challenges for everyone is avoiding misunderstandings and being aware that other people don’t think the same way as you do.

A triangle of time, quality and cost. it’s an indicator that these three parameters are interconnected. You can fix one or two of them, but not three.

We all have been junior developers at some point. This is easy to know because it is at the very beginning of your carrier. Your responsibilities were narrowed down by other peers who were looking after you.

The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of triviality.

People within an organization typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

Revisited: 2023-03-23

Our software profession is constantly evolving; it demands a non-stop learning process. We must embrace the change in our industry.

Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person, and how easily people could be influenced into committing atrocities. For example, Germans in WWII.

There are two known schools in TDD: the mockist school (aka Outside-in) and the classicist school (aka Inside-out).

“Blue Work” and “Red Work” are concepts that David Marquet describes in his book Leadership is Language. Both require different mindsets and have different languages.

These are two different techniques. The key to each of them is about the mindset and context of what you want to achieve.

The complexity here is not about writing tests itself, but the habits that we have to change to create software that is easy to be tested.

The Trident Career Model by Patrick Kua has three tracks. Each track represents where people spend most of their time or energy.

To what extent do social forces alter people’s opinions? Which aspect of the group influence is most important — the size of the majority, or the unanimity of opinion?

What is Open-Source Software (OSS)? What are their benefits? How can you start contributing to any OSS? Pet projects? Knowledge sharing? Why all of these?

Let’s talk about the benefits of Pull Requests and Pair Programming, and my thoughts on these after some years of experience with them.

The book Who moved my cheese? presents a tale inside the main story that consists of 4 characters: two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two little persons, Hem and Haw.

The new Functional Programming language build-in PHP. Check it out!

Mocking is useful, but “what to mock” usually turns out to be a bit more complicated than expected if you don’t treat this carefully.

Discover another way of sharing suggestions with your development team.

Using array_merge inside a loop is a performance killer. The spread operator will help you to improve this by flatting the array.

Argument unpacking, function variable argument list, and variadics function.

No goal should be an achievement on its own, but the process itself that helps us to go in the direction of these goals.

These tests are also known as Characterization tests.

In December 2015, PHP 7 introduced scalar type declarations and with it the strict types flag. What is this new feature?

If you see something, in the scope of your current task, that can be easily improved, improve it. And if you have any questions about it, ask.

Clear contracts, isolated side effects, testability, low complexity and cognitive load, code fluidity, and confidence in yourself.

Why you should consider testing as part of your daily development habit and how it’s directly linked to the software quality.

We have found ourselves attending a meeting that felt like we were wasting our time with a “monologue” that is either hard to follow or doesn’t seem so interesting as it could. Let’s fix this.