No developer should be left behind

As every new year, it is important for me to spend some time thinking about what we can do to improve with the team. Usually, I do it with everyone, but this year, I did it with a small workshop, with a couple of the best members that I have in the team. I did this way because I wanted to focus our effort on finding ideas to help members of the team that are struggling to keep up.

Who needs help ?

I wanted to identify the people who are struggling the most in the team. To do so, we looked at every team member and tried to figure out where they were on a scale from being in total difficulty to close of being awesome.

With this approach, we quickly agreed on a list of people who needs the most help.

What are we looking for in a developer?

Based on the 5 people that we had, we established the list of core values where they should improve:

• Design skills : being able to design an application from start to finish or to be able to critic an existing application
• Technical Skills: basic algorithms, patterns, extensive knowledge about popular framework, being up to date
• Caring: the job is not just a pay check, what is being produced will go in production, other people will be using it
• Autonomy: knowing how to use Google / StackOverflow, even if not everything is crystal clear, how to move forward

What can we do to help ?

Than we had a brainstorming session to identify ideas to reach our goal :

• Online classes : we currently have some, but we identified more that we should get to help with Patterns, Designs.
• Guidelines: we have written an extensive methodology on how we want to build an app. We need to spend more time on presenting / training people on it
• More active Merge Requests: more developers should spend more time on reviewing everyone's merge requests.
• Pair programming: something that we haven't done in a while, but definitively worth it!
• App Review : asking someone to do a full review of an application that he hasn't worked on to better understand the business
• Training: having a formal training by a teacher or an expert on a specific topic
• Bootcamp: creating a "piscine" like in 42 on our frameworks / technologies
• Ops: running ops on an application
• Homework: build a guideline on a specific topic, creating a fake project, having a side project

What is next ?

Out of this list, we identified the first four ideas as the best ideas (easy to implement, easy to follow, not expensive) to help people who needs to be helped. We will start implementing all of this next week. We will try to do a monthly review to adjust and monitor progress.

We are one team, we don't want to have any one left behind ... we are committed in helping the weakest link.