Developer Productivity

In software engineering, your output - the code that you write, is only as good as what you have learned, experienced and understood from your conversations with the client, which is the input. This is true when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). If you use GenAI tools to complement your expertise in software engineering, then here are some strategies you can use to move beyond basic code generation and into collaborative development, or better pair programming with AI. ...

The Beginning: A Problem There was a time when, every month, I spend 10-15 minutes reconciling on-call rotas for payroll - this was just for my teams. As an engineering manager responsible for multiple teams, this task was boring but necessary to compensate my engineers who bore the inconvenience of on-call responsibilities. I’d manually review PagerDuty schedules, count weekday versus weekend hours, apply different compensation rates, and compile everything for payroll processing. The more teams one had, the more time it took away from the already tightly packed schedule of an engineering manager, who manages multiple teams. ...