The Ruby Freelancers Show 043 – Improving Teams




The Freelancers' Show show

Summary: Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:39 - Addressing Team Issues Implementing Change Stand-Up Meetings 04:44 - Stand-Up Meeting Issues 07:37 - Organization Politics Expetise Experience 11:21 - Idea Resistence People Problems Control 18:16 - Problematic Coworkers 20:26 - Team Communication Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Skype Hubot Campfire GoToMeeting Adobe Connect Google+ Hangouts tmux 28:10 - Assigning Tickets & Stories 36:22 - Finding Solutions to Problems You Don’t Understand 38:04 - When Change Doesn’t Happen Satisfaction Level 40:01 - Management Issues/Changes 42:43 - Team Planning Planning Poker Estimations 48:17 - Ideas for Integration Leveraging Experience Picks Poor man’s guide to managing Ruby versions (Jim) Extreme Programming Pocket Guide (Eric) Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz (Chuck) Transcript ERIC: Helloooooooo! [Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com] [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 43 of the Ruby Freelancer Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: We also have Jim Gay. JIM: I'm back! CHUCK: You are back! We missed you! JIM: Thank you. CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv and I've been working hard on railsrampup.com. So if you wanna learn Ruby on Rails, go check it out! Alright, this week we're going to be talking about -- I don't know what the title of the show would be yet, but we're going to be talking about like improving team, processes, communication, etcetera, etcetera. When you're a freelancer on the team and -- we may go into like what you can do when you're new, what you can do when you've been around and earn some street cred, but let's just jump in and talk about some of the stuff. Just to kick it off, I generally like to just come up with something that's relevant from my experience. I'm working on a team right now, and the things that actually been reasonably good over there. And most of the time if I have a concern, or a thought, or an idea, I can just get away with going to the Director over the project and he'll usually talk through it with me and then implement a change if it's good idea. So, I just kind of wanna throw that out there because sometimes the solution is pretty simple. JIM: Yeah! I've definitely done that; making sure that I'm constantly talking to whoever the project manager is. I don't know, I've kind of looked at conversations like around process and comments and say "You know, I've noticed this and I wonder about changing it to that". Just in terms of thinking like "let's try it!" or maybe "we should try it!". Or if you don't wanna try it, fine. I'm sure there will have other things. But I've never felt like even though sometimes I felt really strongly, we really ought to find a better way to communicate or something like that. I never tried to put my foot down like "look, it must be done this way". And sometimes I feel like I want to be the guy who will do that,