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Software Development

My team doesn’t use source control. What do I do?

By Mitch Routt on Saturday, January 5, 2019

You just joined a small team of developers. You are asking a bunch of questions about the code base. What technologies are we using? How do I set up my development environment? Where is the code? Someone on the team then presents you with a zip file. The terrifying reality washes over you. Your team …

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Management

Stand-ups – We can do better

By Mitch Routt on Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Every development team I have worked on since about 2009 has had a daily stand-up meeting. Along with sprint planning and retrospectives, stand-up meetings are one of the holy trinity of SCRUM meetings whose existence and necessity are seldom challenged. But what are stand-ups really for? Reporting of task status. This should be handled by …

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Management

Your next software engineering hire might already be in the building

By Mitch Routt on Friday, November 17, 2017

At one of my previous companies, the production system had a series of functional gaps. Manual intervention was required in order to support some exceptional data cases. My engineering manager had been performing almost 100% of this work in an attempt to shield the engineering team from the interrupt-driven distraction of dealing with these support …

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Management

From Product to Platform – A short case study in failure

By Mitch Routt on Tuesday, November 14, 2017

I used to work for a small company that had a single, highly profitable core product. As you would expect, this small company wanted to be a big company with a diversified portfolio of products. The business leadership was continuously proposing new ways to leverage the company’s core abilities to serve other markets and user …

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About Me

Hello! My name is Mitch Routt. I am an experienced software developer currently managing a a small team at USE Credit Union in San Diego.

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