I spent the first 10 years of my career teaching (various subjects) and training teachers. This training work included facilitating PLCs (which I’d say most public schools have), leading seminars and workshops, and coaching.

As technical teams, we want be able to make bold technical decisions and respond to need quickly and decisively. Even with the best software developers, technical skill is not the only prerequisite.

I recently had to help a customer troubleshoot a Wordpress setup. This isn’t a big deal, but it’d been long enough since the last time I had Wordpress running locally that I couldn’t remember the exact steps for getting MAMP, PHPMyAdmin, and the like running to actually get the site up.

When we jump into a new codebase and begin orienting ourselves, assuming that we possess the desire to be good teammates and collaborators, there are a few questions we can ask (these are not the only questions we should ask; merely some questions we can ask):

Hi, and welcome! I’m Andrew Ek. I do lots of things, but the things I do during my day job mostly involve writing software, working with organizations to make sure their developers are learning and growing, and building new products and services.