The Big Nerd Ranch Blog

I was exhausted after my first few months, under the impression that I would be devoting a huge amount of emotional energy to every project that I would ever manage for the unforeseeable future… When I shifted my thinking from trying to be good at everything to being excellent at a few things, I finally felt settled into my role.

How to implement a flux pattern in VueJS without Vuex. Use VueJS’s reactive framework to manage state in 38 lines of code

In this series, we have looked at what it takes to build a great Engineering Team. This post is going to be a little different as we chat with Angie Terrell to get some of her thoughts on the topics shared thus far. Angie is the director of the Design team at Big Nerd Ranch, where she is also a Design Bootcamp instructor. Angie has been leading the Design team for over three years now and continues to push Big Nerd Ranch to excellence in all of the disciplines of Design for Digital Product Development.

In this series, we have looked at what it takes to build a great Engineering Team. This post is going to be a little different as we chat with Chris Stewart to get some of his thoughts on the topics shared thus far. Chris is the director of the Android team at Big Nerd Ranch, where he is also an Android Bootcamp instructor. Chris co-authored the best selling Big Nerd Ranch guide on Android Programming and has been leading the Android Engineering team for over five years.

Part of building something great is building it to last. No one builds a home for a season, and the same is true for your Engineering team. Retaining your team for the long haul is no easy task, but it is imperative that as a leader it is a priority. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do to retain your excellent Engineering team.

There is no doubt that the web is one of the most influential platform of our time. The power and impact of the web in recent years can largely be attributed to the explosion of JavaScript. It’s expansion out of the web browser and onto the server and other devices also continues to gain momentum. Along this journey, JavaScript has grown from a trivial “web-companion” scripting language to a standardized, robust programming language that is arguably the most-used of any in 2018. Due to its versatility and adaptability, as JavaScript creator Brendan Eich states, “always bet on JavaScript”.

Are you hiring with character in mind? Are you too focused on skill and find yourself overlooking traits that clash with your values? Knowing where you are on these fronts will go a long way in helping you build a great team.

When you inherit a team you inherit not only the people but you also get the culture and any baggage that comes along with that. It is imperative as leaders inheriting a team that we assess where we are so we can know where we need to go.