12 May 2019 A recurring theme in the two conferences I’ve attended in the last fortnight (Agile Manchester and BeyondTech) has been psychological safety, people’s perception of being in a safe place to take risks: to bring up new ideas, to raise concerns, to admit your own mistakes. Amy Edmondson found that it was the most important feature of effective teams, findings corroborated by Google’s Project Aristotle. A key point of Gitte Klitgaard’s excellent talk Psychological safety: overprotection or not? (Read...)

5 May 2019 I attended the inaugural BeyondTech conference in London this week. It was great! I found out about the conference from a colleague, and I’m really glad they pointed it out to me. My particular highlights were: Sapphire Mason-Brown’s Just Add Diversity—why a diverse tech industry isn’t enough. Particularly alarming to me were the statistics from the survey of people leaving the tech industry: a quarter of people of colour experienced stereotyping; 1 in 10 women had received unwanted sexual attention; 20% of LGBTQ folk had been bullied. (Read...)

13 Apr 2019 New year, new website? Not really. I haven’t updated my old website, rothwell.im, since 2015, when I (still at university) got cross about the Government’s scheme advertising fibre broadband. Four years ago! That’s before the Brexit referendum was even a twinkle in David Cameron’s eye. This website, as you may guess from the .dev TLD, will mainly be talking about software development. Since the last time I blogged, I’ve been in a new job (almost four years, now! (Read...)