James Carr

In any organization, the role of a manager is crucial to ensure that the team performs to its full potential.

Turn the Ship Around!

One of the immense difficulties I have faced while running production engineering-type teams is how much-unplanned work can drop into their daily workload.

“The First 90 Days” by Michael D.

I was chatting with a team member of mine about their career growth plans a few weeks ago and while we were on the topic he mentioned he’d always appreciate book recommendations for growing into engineering management.

“What should be done for his disciples out of compassion by a Teacher who seeks their welfare and has compassion for them, that I have done for you, Ānanda.

As a newly promoted engineering manager, I am still learning about the various ways to improve my team’s performance.

I think I am long overdue for writing a post about how we run infrastructure at Zapier.

I thought I’d share this since it was something I unfortunately, spent a good portion of my afternoon wrestling with.

Behavior Driven Development is best described as taking an “Outside-In” approach, meaning you define your feature from the outset and describe business value, and work your way in a small piece at a time.

I use vagrant a lot and at Zapier I use a setup where one Vagrantfile can be used to launch any instance in our infrastructure locally for testing.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the very first HackCoMo meetup at Bambinos and thought I’d share the experience.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. - Socrates As those of you who read my blog often know, I recently made a career jump to a contracting firm to consult at different large-scale organizations.

Recently, I developed a web application for my friend Alex Miller’s conference, Strange Loop.

When I was growing up I always thought that my life would hit some kind of point where everything will start moving very quickly and that I’d have to keep up with the current before I get swept away.

Tuesday night I gave a talk at a local Java User Group (that’s four JUG appearances this year, hoorah!)

I am preparing to conduct a retrospective for my team at my current client site.

When it comes to working in the software industry, I believe I can best summarize what the majority of developers and teams do by quoting Pink Floyd’s song “Breathe”: Run, rabbit run Dig that hole, forget the sun And when at last the work is done Don’t sit

This Thursday I attended a Twestival organized by jenleereeves and finally got to meet up with a ton of local “tweeters” I’ve followed for quite a while as well as meet several for the first time.

I’ll let you in on a dirty secret: my first paid programming task was to make custom modifications to an oscommerce shopping cart.