Forem: Adam Piechocki-Brown

Coaching and mentoring

Adam Piechocki-Brown — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 18:09:13 +0000

One of the most valuable boosts you can get in your engineering career is the guidance of a good coach or mentor. This isn’t always easy to achieve. Not many companies and managers, especially in smaller businesses, take this role as seriously as they should. I’ve seen the difference it can make and I now have the opportunity to assist others.

So, I’m offering three monthly coaching slots for engineers who want that boost. These sessions will be free and run remotely. If we meet in person post-pandemic you can buy the coffee!

I’m giving priority to engineers from groups often underrepresented in engineering, be that on the basis of gender, religion, race, disability, etc.

So if you’re interested drop me a message and I’ll arrange an initial chat.

If you want to know a bit more about me take a look on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-piechocki-brown-engineer/

How can I help a dev who struggles with questions?

Adam Piechocki-Brown — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 08:11:58 +0000

One of my team struggles a bit with direct questions. They sort of seize up a bit. We've chatted about this and they seem to feel under pressure to supply an answer and be sure it's correct answer. We've talked about being super well prepared and also I've demonstrated some simple strategies to buy time when the brain locks up. I've also explained that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. And that getting it wrong isn't a tragedy, no one will die!

Within our team we can manage this and work with them. But it's tough for them when working with customers. They inevitably ask questions, on a range from desperately vague to downright rude.

Who else out there seizes up a bit when questions are fired at them? What have you done about it? Are there any tips or strategies I can pass along?

Thanks :)

What could possibly go wrong?

Adam Piechocki-Brown — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 16:25:54 +0000

Last day in the office before the Christmas break. A couple of glasses of fizzy at lunchtime before the office party.

Now would be a great time to sort out some git repos and tinker with the build server.

Hilarity ensues...

User stories in a mixed software/hardware environment

Adam Piechocki-Brown — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 13:05:35 +0000

I'm a team lead for a small team of devs. We've been Agile-ish for a few years but there are a few areas causing problems. The main one is getting good user stories for things that users don't care/know about.

We deliver embedded solutions that are a mixture of hardware and software. There's a lot that has to happen that doesn't relate easily to the user requirements.

For instance, they might want a system to check the distribution of pepperoni on a pizza (yes, really). We'd probably treat that high level requirement as a epic and break it down it down into things like:

As a Production Engineer I want to make sure there is no more than 10 grams of pepperoni on the pizza so that I can meet my efficiency target

As a QA manager I want to ensure the pepperoni is evenly distributed across the pizza so we don't get complaints from the supermarkets.

But I feel there's potential for things to get missed. We might need to spend 20 days designing a pepperoni detection algorithm or we might have to spend 10 days designing and building an electrical cabinet.

I don't want to leave them 'hidden' within larger stories. I'd like those tasks to emerge as part of the story process. But it feels a bit forced. Who would be the user for a story about an electrical cabinet?

Any suggestions appreciated!