Part of being an effective software engineer and leveling up in your career is effectively working in a team!
Cameron Sapp and a Little Background A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I wanted to start publicly acknowledging some of my teammates. While this is the first one, it certainly won't be the last. At Magnet Forensics, I'm surrounded by many individuals that bring a lot to the table. There's certainly no reason and no way I'd only be able to pick one person to write about. Now there wasn't a particular reason I picked this individual first, but I think I had some concrete things fresh in my head that I wanted to share. Without too much more rambling, I'd like to introduce Cameron Sapp! New Kid on the Block Cameron joined our team earlier this year. I don't think any of us doubted his technical abilities and we were all excited to bring him on board.…
Innovation and You There's no denying innovation is important. You often see startups oozing with innovation completely disrupt a market and consequently, there are tons of people out there with dreams to do the same thing. How do you jack up the innovation level in your company? Why is it that startups seem to be so much better at innovating even though multi-million dollar companies have the people and financial resources to throw at R&D? Why do big companies suck at innovating? The answer starts with your employees. Empowering your employees to innovate and embedding innovation in the work culture is key to ensuring your company continues to innovate. With big companies, the focus moves from innovation to profit maximization. Over time though, some small team of highly innovative individuals are going to find a way to do it differently…
Last week I mentioned a colleague of mine, Tayfun Uzun, had a little surprise. He's put together a great write up on intrapreneurship and what it means to be an intrapreneur. The importance of Intrapreneurship Innovation is the life-blood of any organization; we have all heard it and one way or another understand it. Actually, let me rephrase that. Revenue is the life-blood of any organization, but innovation begets revenue. One big movement in large companies is the idea of intraprenuership, the act of behaving like an entrepreneur within an established organization. Intrapreneurship is baked into your culture--it starts from your first hires in a start-up and needs to persist as you grow. It is not something that you can take a two day course and learn, much like entrepreneurship. Why do you need intrapreneurship? Well, innovation is what sells.…
Recognition - Weekly Article Dump Not all of the articles this week touch on recognition, and to be honest, I didn't pick it as a theme for the articles either. Recognition is more a topic of discussion that's come up over the last week at Magnet Forensics, where I work. Being a team lead and part of the management team at Magnet, I'm often part of conversations about motivation. Providing recognition is an excellent way to motivate your staff and shows that you truly appreciate them. We've been trying to get better at recognizing staff for doing an awesome job--especially because we have so many awesome people working with us. It's pretty obvious with our Profit Hot 50 placement that we've got some kick-ass people. Recognition, whether it's one-on-one or in a public setting, has a huge impact. I don't…
PROFIT HOT 50 It's with great honour that I can say the company I'm part of, Magnet Forensics, has achieved the 7th place in the Profit Hot 50 rankings for 2013. Last year Magnet Forensics was also on the list ranked at number 16th, but we've shown ourselves up by moving a full 9 positions! Our ranking in the Profit Hot 50 is even more impressive considering we're the only company from Kitchener-Waterloo region in Ontario--Known for it's incredible startup community and success stories--that made the list. We're excited and tremendously proud of our accomplishments, but it's certainly going to be quite the challenge for us to move up in rank next year. It's a challenge we're all ready to take on though. You can check out the ranking over here or at the official Profit Guide posting. Articles I'll put…
Background I’m sure what I’m about to talk about here doesn’t just relate to programming–it relates to any team-based project where everyone works on a small portion of the big picture. My experiences are primarily geared toward writing code in teams, so try to find parallels in your own work/experiences if you’re not a programmer. Anyway, enough of that. When someone puts a lot of effort into something, they’ll often take great pride in the finished product. Of course, it’s great that they do! They’ve slaved away at something at work for days, weeks, or months, and it’s finally working/implemented. Other people are using it and it’s doing its job as expected. Awesome! What kinds of things could possibly go sour here? If you have experience working in teams to complete a project, you might have some ideas. Ownership You…
