developertools
Developers Are Human
Over 30 years ago, a CS professor of mine dropped a piece of wisdom as an aside in class. Dr. Soroka told us that every time he fixed something in a program, he got a little jolt of happiness. A little high. And he’d noticed something curious: the size of the high was not proportional […]
Apple had lost the plot. Did they rediscover it?
Last year I sold almost all of an Apple position I’d spent fifteen years building. The decision had nothing to do with the stock price. I assumed it would keep climbing for a while, the way Intel kept climbing long after it stopped being the company that defined its industry. Great companies run on a […]
The Asymmetrical Advantage of Distributed Teams
I’ve talked before about BiTE’s completely distributed team, and how I think this is one of the keys to our success. Not only does it vastly open up the talent pool when looking for new team members but it decreases turnover while increasing productivity and flexibility. I’m often asked how we deal with the “inherent […]
What a Successful Slack Implementation Looks Like
Tips to make Slack an amazing tool for your team. At BiTE, we’re huge fans of Slack. For the uninitiated, Slack is an amazing collaboration tool. It starts with chat; both person-to-person as well as group chats (“channels” in Slack parlance) are exceptional. It handles sharing files between team members, offers integrations to other services, […]
The Path Less Traveled for Talent Recruitment and Retention
According to London Business School’s Annual Global Leadership Summit poll, over a third of surveyed companies project more than 50% of their workforce will work remote by 2020. That may seem like a surprising number until you realize how much a remote workforce could benefit your company. Here’s how it benefited ours: When Brant DeBow […]
BDD Toolbox: Outcome Questioning
BDD Toolbox is an ongoing series of posts in which I’ll give you tools to do Behavior Driven Development well. Today we’ll take a look at Outcome Questioning – a tool to help ensure all relevant details are captured in your scenarios. I’ve talked in the past about Behavior Driven Development and how I believe […]
What Shoveling Snow Taught Me About Making Great Mobile Apps
How shoveling snow this winter helped me contemplate what makes great software I live at the top of a steep and twisting driveway that quickly turns into what I’ve described to my team in Slack as “a snowy deathcoaster”. While spending a few hours trying to end my family’s snow-exile, my mind drifted to thoughts […]
How to Do BDD and Agile Well for Your Mobile App Project
In a previous post I wrote about how Jobs to be Done theory can be used to develop a clear and powerful mobile strategy. But once you have this mobile strategy in place, and have developed your stories, how do you then execute BDD well in an Agile environment? Going from a waterfall, fixed-price […]






