DEV Community: Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️

Free Java Courses (With Certificates!) From The Creators of IntelliJ IDEA 🤯

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:54:11 +0000

Confession time: I’ve been using IntelliJ IDEA for years, but somehow I completely missed Hyperskill — the learning platform built by the same team behind our favorite IDE.

If you’re learning Java (or any programming language really), you’ve probably faced the same dilemma: there’s no shortage of tutorials, but finding structured, hands-on practice that doesn’t cost a fortune? That’s another story.

Enter Hyperskill — a platform I wish I’d discovered sooner.

What Is Hyperskill?

Hyperskill is an educational platform created by JetBrains — yes, the same folks who brought us IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and Kotlin. It’s their answer to the question: “How can we help people really learn to code, not just watch videos about it?”

And here’s the best part: they offer 82 completely free courses. Not trials. Not “first module free.” Actually free.

Why Hyperskill Works (For Me and Thousands of Others)

After spending some time on the platform, here’s what makes it different:

🧠 Real Coding Exercises

Forget multiple-choice questions. You actually write code, get immediate feedback, and learn by doing. The exercises range from simple syntax practice to complex algorithmic challenges.

🎮 Gamification That Doesn’t Feel Cheesy

You get 7 “lives” per day — meaning you can make up to 7 mistakes before the platform gently suggests you take a break. It sounds simple, but it actually works. It keeps you from rage-quitting after the tenth failed test.

📁 Project-Based Learning

Each learning track includes projects that simulate real-world applications. You’re not just learning isolated concepts; you’re building things that could actually go on your portfolio.

📊 Progress Visualization

The platform shows your learning progress in a clean, visual way. It’s surprisingly motivating to watch that progress bar fill up.

Free Java Courses on Hyperskill

For my fellow Java developers (or aspiring ones), here’s what’s available completely free:

☕ Beginner Level

Introduction to Java

The perfect starting point. Covers Java basics, data structures, OOP principles, errors, exceptions, and debugging. If you’re new to Java, start here.

Java Developer

A comprehensive track that takes you beyond the basics. Java syntax, functional programming, collections, multithreading, and basic design patterns.

🌱 Spring Ecosystem

Introduction to Spring Boot with Java

Learn dependency injection, autoconfiguration, and building web applications with Spring Boot. Perfect for getting started with the framework.

Java Backend Developer (Spring Boot)

The next level: deeper Spring Boot concepts and testing. If you’ve done the intro course and want to go further, this is your path.

Spring Security for Java Backend Developers

Authentication, authorization, role-based access control. Not for absolute beginners, but essential once you’re ready to build secure applications.

🖥️ Specialized Tracks

Java Desktop Application Developer

Yes, Swing is still a thing! If desktop development is your interest, this track covers building GUI applications with Java.

Java Full Stack Developer

Backend (Java) + frontend (JavaScript). A solid foundation if you want to understand both sides of web development.

Advanced Java

Design patterns for fault tolerance, performance tuning, identifying bottlenecks, and deep dives into Java 17 features. For when you’re ready to level up.

Algorithmic Thinking for Java Developers

Because sometimes LeetCode hurts less when you have a structured approach. Best practices for algorithms and finding optimal solutions to complex problems.

The Bottom Line

If you’re learning Java and want:

Structured, hands-on practice
Real projects for your portfolio
Immediate feedback on your code
Certificates to showcase your learning …all without spending money — Hyperskill is worth your time.

I’m not affiliated with them (just a happy user who regrets not finding this platform sooner). But honestly? This is one of those resources that makes you wonder why more people aren’t talking about it.

Have you tried Hyperskill? What’s your go-to free learning resource for Java?

Drop your recommendations in the comments — let’s share the wealth of knowledge. The best resources are often the ones we discover through each other.

Enjoyed this article? I share more Java tips, free resources, and my journey as a junior developer on my Telegram channel: Java Captain. Join me there for daily insights! ☕

Software Devs, What Tools You Can't Do Without?

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 15:33:19 +0000

Any development essentials or favorite productivity tools? Please, share!

32 Effective Ways to Increase Productivity at Work (+ Tools)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 13:39:22 +0000

If you want to increase your productivity at work but are tired of reading articles advising you to get better sleep and manage distractions, you will enjoy the 32 tips listed in this article. You will learn to do more in less time, manage stress, overcome procrastination, improve work performance, and advance your career faster. Bookmark or share this page to return to it later.

Manage Your Attention

Plan your day
Control your environment
Check with your goals

Enhance Concentration

Start a timer
Quit using pomodoros
Try the Flowtime technique instead
Limit social media consumption
Develop mental strength
Take better care of your health
Unload your mind
Try meditation
Consult with doctor

Improve Work Performance

Automate routines
Improve routine tasks
Use peak productivity time
Ask for feedback
Learn to handle criticism

Master Time Management

Track time
Estimate activities
Set deadlines
Reflect on your performance regularly)

Improve Work Prioritization

Use the Ivy Lee method
Apply the Pareto principle
Implement the ABCDE approach

Overcome Procrastination & Burnout

Break down big projects
Get comfortable with imperfection

Manage Stress

Identify your stressors
Develop healthy responses

Build Hard Skills

Hone your professional skills
Know your tools

Manage Your Attention

The sharpness of attention is a key predictor of work productivity and rapid career growth. If you are distracted all the time or, even worse, do not know where you are going, no effort will be favorable. Laser-focusing attention is the first step towards productivity and mastery at work.

“Where your attention goes, your time goes.” — Idowu Koyenikan

1. Plan your day

Daily planning is essential for several reasons:

it cuts through the noise and makes you focus on what is important
it reduces stress as you know what to expect from your day and how to ace every task
it helps you maintain the work-life balance

Moreover, daily planning is a smart way to trick your brain into achieving short-term goals. Every time you cross out a task from your list, your brain releases dopamine – a hormone that gives us a sense of satisfaction, improves concentration, and makes you want to experience this energy boost again. Doing daily tasks one by one will help you get through your day efficiently and stress-free.

**Pro tip: **One of the best ways to gauge your attention on daily tasks is to bring technology along. Choose a task tracker that suits your taste, plan your weeks, prioritize tasks, and track time to see how productive you are.

2. Control your environment

If you don’t take your attention under control, your environment will: notifications, messages, chatty colleagues, an unfinished chocolate bar on your table – you name it. Follow these steps to overcome distractions and own your environment:

Identify things and activities that are stealing your attention
Block time for work-related distractions like answering instant messages and emails
Notify others about your availability
Eliminate the rest (close the door, put on headphones, etc.)

Pro tip: Document your distractions for a week and record ideas on how you can manage them.

Background Music for Coding for Every Taste🎶

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Apr 20 '21

#productivity #100daysofcode #webdev #career

3. Check with your goals

Do you know why you do the job that you do? Are you building new skills and expanding your expertise, or are you just doing what you’ve been told? If your answer is the latter, you can stop right here, recap the first two tips and close this tab – there’s no use in becoming productive without a direction.

On the contrary, if you have your “whys” and a strategy you follow, we welcome you on board. The next tips will boost your work productivity and help you grow faster.

“The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.”– Benjamin E. Mays

Pro tip: Create and follow your career development plan – a document outlining your career goals and an action plan for reaching your professional goals. Check with it from time to time to see where you are going and how well you are doing.

20 Productivity Tips From Developers to Developers

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Mar 13 '22

#productivity #career #programming #motivation

Enhance Concentration

Concentration is the ability to give your attention or thought to a single object or activity and resist distractions. The bad news is that no tips or tricks will help you improve your concentration overnight. The good news is that concentration is much like a mental muscle, and you can build it up and strengthen it with practice.

“The highest form of work is that which is done with the deepest concentration.” ― Dr Prem Jagyasi

4. Start a timer

Whenever you start or continue working on a task, start a timer. The trick here is that a timer makes you focus on a single task until you take a break or finish it and stop the timer. The best timers are those in time tracking apps: you can add your tasks, start timers to record the time spent on them, and review your productivity in a few clicks.

actiTIME’s time tracking extension for Chrome – pick a task, start a timer, press stop to update your timesheet and review productivity

5. Quit using pomodoros

Pomodoros damage productivity, period. The Pomodoro technique is supposed to increase your concentration and prevent interruptions. In fact, it either forces you to work longer than you are comfortable with or interrupts you when you are fully engaged in the work. Moreover, Pomodoros prevent you from getting into a flow state – a state of deep focus and high and effortless productivity – because Pomodoros are short bursts of effort, which is opposite to how our brains work.

Pomodoros interrupt concentration and prevent from achieving peak productivity

How to Help Developers Work in The Flow

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Jun 30 '21

#productivity #career #webdev #devops

6. Try the Flowtime technique instead

The Flowtime technique was developed as a solution to Pomodoro’s problems. It requires you to write down the one task you will work on and record the start time or start timer. Next, you work for as long as you are comfortable with and center your focus and thoughts on a single task. Whenever you feel tired or distracted, you need to record the stop time or stop the timer and take a break for however long you need to feel refreshed.

7. Limit social media consumption

Social media is not only an addictive time waste but also a thing that damages mental health and wellbeing, including adverse effects on work productivity. Numerous studies have shown that social media causes anxiety, depression, unhealthy sleep patterns, stunted creativity, reduced self-esteem, distracts from life and work goals, and so on. Here’s how it works:

Whenever you reach your phone, open your favorite app and give it a few “harmless” scrolls, a pleasure hormone is released into your brain, making the brain crave it more and less willing to be disciplined. So, you either surrender to media corporations or take your work and career under control.

Brain of a regular social media consumer

Here are a few tips on how to break this habit:

Pick the time of day when you are allowed to use social media. Let’s say, during lunch or your daily commute.
Replace that time void with something meaningful. Instead of voluntarily giving up on your mental health, you can have a walk to increase concentration or talk to others in person to release stress.

8. Develop mental strength

Discipline is like a muscle: the more you train it, the more determined and strong-willed you become. The five-more rule is one of the simplest ways of building mental strength. The idea is simple: whenever you feel like quitting or losing concentration, tell yourself to do five more of whatever you are doing.

Let’s say you are compiling a work report and start feeling tired. Instead of taking a break immediately, outline five more points or write five more paragraphs. Find the energy deep within to do five more and become more concentrated the next time you get back to work.

9. Take better care of your health

Work productivity begins with a lifestyle. Quality nutrition gives the body the right macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals to function. Regular physical activity relieves stress, improves memory, helps get better sleep, and boosts mood and concentration. Finally, sleep deprivation leads to lower alertness and concentration and impairs judgment. So, review your lifestyle and build healthy habits to lay a solid foundation for productivity at work and in life.

“Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.” ― Charles Duhigg

10. Unload your mind

An unstable and wandering mind results from uncontrolled thoughts, ideas, and feelings swarming in your mind. Luckily, unloading your mind is easy – you need to write out everything that bothers you. If you think of all the things you need to do this week, take your time to list them in a task management app and get back to work. If you are stressed or worried about something, pour your feelings out on paper, and you will feel more focused immediately.

11. Try meditation

Meditation is a powerful tool that changes the structure and function of the brain, reduces stress, anxiety, and depression, increases focus and concentration, and improves memory and attention span. In other words, meditation reduces stress and mind wandering, releasing brain power for tasks that matter.

Here’s how Robert Greene, a best-selling author of books on power, describes his experience of daily 35-minute meditations: “it allows me to focus on how things really are instead of being inside the same circle of recurring thoughts […] it keeps me afloat during the entire day. It puts me in a good mood that will last quite a while. Not forever, but quite a while.”

Pro tip: If you are new to meditation, try guided meditation apps. After starting one, you will be given simple instructions guiding you through the process. After you get some experience, you will be able to meditate anytime and anywhere.

12. Consult with doctor

If you have a hard time concentrating at work, experience loss of motivation, low energy, and change in eating and sleeping habits, do not ignore it. These might be symptoms of burnout, anxiety, ADHD, or depression. Instead of pushing yourself even harder and reading productivity and time management hacks, you need to see your doctor about them immediately. Otherwise, your symptoms may worsen, and you will need more time to recover.

How to Prevent or Recover from Developer Burnout

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Jun 20 '21

#productivity #webdev #devops #career

Improve Work Performance

Work performance is how well a person fulfills the duties of their role, completes their tasks, and behaves in the workplace. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to improve your work’s quality, quantity, and efficiency – the three key performance measurements.

13. Automate routines

Any job has routine tasks that usually take up a significant portion of your working hours. Fortunately, there are hundreds of tools online that can do them for you, saving hours and days of your time in the long run. Google automating tools for professional needs and task management tools. For example, explore the functionality of Zapier and IFTTT automation software for general use. Using Grammarly alone to check your emails before sending them will save you a great deal of time and save you from email-sending anxiety

Online timesheet interface in actiTIME where users can track time
and fine-tune their timesheet to their liking

14. Improve routine tasks

Not any routine can be automated – some require your attention and effort. To tackle routine tasks faster and more effectively, you must ask yourself what you can do to manage them more effectively.

For example, if you spend a few hours answering emails weekly, you can create email templates, set up spam filters, review email sorting settings, use tools such as Unroll.me to unsubscribe from unnecessary newsletters in bulk, and so on. Alternatively, if you perform the same routines repeatedly, you can document them in tools such as Notion.

15. Use peak productivity time

According to science, everyone experiences times when they are most focused and effective, usually lasting for about 90 minutes; these are known as peak productivity times. Some people experience these times during the early hours and others by the end of the day.

Use a time tracker to keep a log of several days, and review your statistics to identify patterns. Schedule the most demanding tasks for the most productive periods and perform simple and routine tasks for the rest of your working day.

Customizable widgets in actiTIME displaying real-time statistics across selected users, projects and periods

16. Ask for feedback

Reflecting on work performance is an integral part of increasing productivity at work. You must ensure that you meet your goals and perform your duties adequately. Asking for feedback is a common practice in the workplace, and it can be easy if you take the proper steps.

Find an appropriate time to ask for feedback
Schedule an appointment with your manager
Prepare a list of questions
Take notes
Turn the feedback into action

“Doing just 1% of something is better than doing 20% of nothing”

17. Learn to handle criticism

When asking for feedback, you should be ready to take criticism. This skill is essential for achieving productivity and success in your personal and professional lives, improving relationships, and negotiating abilities. When taking criticism, you need to remember the following:

Practice active listening. Focus on the speaker and what they say, repeat or rephrase what you hear for confirmation.
Control your emotions. Take a deep breath and pause before responding to criticism. You may also ask to take time to reflect on the conversation before you discuss it further.
Don’t take it personally. You are not your job. Remember that criticism at the workplace typically refers to your work, not your personality.
Process the feedback. Avoid getting defensive, giving excuses, or justifying your actions. Think of what you can do differently to achieve better results.
Show appreciation. Appreciate the person, their honesty and delivery verbally or by email.

Master Time Management

Productivity is about achieving more in less time. If you don’t manage time, no tool will help you increase productivity at work. This section is one of the key ones in this article, so pay attention.

18. Track time

The first and most crucial step towards making the most of your time is measuring it because you cannot manage what you do not measure. Find and implement a time tracker that is simple to use and powerful enough to give you compelling analytics of your daily effort. Add tasks and routines to the system, use timers or manual time tracking, specify estimates and deadlines to accomplish everything on time, and refer to statistics to identify productivity patterns.

**Pro tip: **Track even the most minor tasks like phone calls, meetings, coffee breaks, and distraction time – you’ll be amazed at how many hours these tasks take you daily.

19. Estimate activities

Time estimation is another critical time management skill that is required to learn to manage your time wisely. The idea is simple: at the start of the day or week, you need to specify how much time you plan to spend on particular tasks, and then you need to measure how much time they actually took you.

This time estimating approach often reveals that most underestimate the time required to accomplish specific activities. This knowledge is essential in work planning and helps identify realistic timeframes and deadlines for work activities.

Master These Three Skills to Improve Time Management 🚀

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Feb 4 '21

#productivity #career #100daysofcode

20. Set deadlines

Not all tasks are born equal; some of them have due dates. To relieve yourself from remembering all the deadlines, you can use time tracking software to visualize them and help you prioritize your activities more effectively.

Timesheet interface in actiTIME where you can set estimates deadlines for each task and track them right in the timesheet

21. Reflect on your performance regularly

Estimate your tasks, set deadlines and track time against them. When you finish the tasks, review your performance, identify trends, and make it a game to reach better results next time to add a little competition to your productivity efforts at work.

20 Most Common Time Management Problems & Solutions ⚡

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Feb 10 '21

#productivity #career #100daysofcode #womenintech

Improve Work Prioritization

Deadlines are not the only indicators of task urgency. Some tasks may require your immediate attention to prevent bottlenecks in your projects. Let’s see the three most effective prioritization techniques.

If everything is called a priority, then nothing is

22. Use the Ivy Lee method

Follow these steps to achieve peak productivity:

At the end of the workday, write down six of the most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow.
Prioritize these tasks in order of importance.
The next day, concentrate only on the first task and work until it is completed.
Go through the list one by one.
At the end of the day, create a new list of the six most important tasks for the next day.

Repeat this process every day to accomplish your work on time. When you finish the tasks, review your performance, identify trends, and make it a game to reach better results next time to add a little competition to your productivity efforts at work.

23. Apply the Pareto principle

According to this principle, only 20% of tasks provide 80% of results. You need to identify these or consult with your manager about their priorities and do them first. This way, for the rest of your workday, you can do the low-impact tasks without rush and hassle.

“Do the hard jobs first. Easy jobs will take care of themselves.” – Dale Carnegie

24. Implement the ABCDE approach

Not each task requires your attention – some of them you can delegate or eliminate. With the ABCDE technique, you can determine their priority status by assigning them one of the following grades:

A for most important tasks
B for less critical tasks
C for tasks with no consequences
D for tasks to delegate
E for tasks that you can eliminate without consequence

Pro tip: For more prioritization techniques, consult our guide on the key 10 approaches.

Overcome Procrastination & Burnout

Procrastination and burnout are two of the most ruthless killers of your workplace productivity. While they are caused by different reasons and have different symptoms, which you should see your doctor about, below are some tips on going through times like these and dealing with work effectively.

“Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the “someday I’ll” philosophy.” – Denis Waitley

25. Break down big projects

When dealing with procrastination or burnout, you need to be considerate of your mental health and not push yourself too hard. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is to break your work into more approachable and doable tasks. Go through the list one by one to obtain a sense of accomplishment and become motivated to keep going.

**Pro tip: **When breaking down your work into small tasks, identify the highest priority or most demanding items (frogs). Block time on your calendar every day, ideally, first thing in the morning, to “eat these frogs,” which will help you get through the rest of the day with ease.

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” – Mark Twain

26. Get comfortable with imperfection

Another way to increase productivity when you feel low is to lower your standards. Remember that 20% of efforts produce 80% of results? Then why go overboard? Ask yourself, “What level of imperfection am I willing to tolerate?” or talk to your manager about your work standards.

One more thing to remember when you do not feel like you are on fire is that mistakes are not bad. Instead of going hard on yourself, celebrate them because mistakes are an essential ingredient of growth.

27. Review your progress regularly

Procrastination and burnout can stem from the feeling that you do not make any progress in your work and career. The simplest way to deal with this unreasonable statement is to visualize your work progress using a Kanban board. We advise you to use the following names of the lists, although you can use any other that suits your needs:

Backlog
This week
Tomorrow
Today
Work in progress (WIP)
Pen
Done

Kanban board in actiTIME displaying custom workflow statuses and allowing you to easily drag-and-drop tasks between their statuses

Manage Stress

Work-related stress is a problem that affects work productivity. While occasional stress can be good for you, continuous exposure to stress often leads to burnout accompanied by exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of inefficacy. Use the following tips to minimize the adverse effects of stress on your work productivity.

28. Identify your stressors

Record situations that cause you to stress for a few weeks. Include your thoughts and feelings, other people’s actions, environmental factors, and your reactions. Review your notes to identify what situations put you under stress, how effectively you manage them, and what you can do better about them in the future. Find the patterns and develop healthy responses to stressful situations.

29. Develop healthy responses

Most of us tend to fight stress with fast food and alcohol and develop unhealthy addictions that damage our work productivity and negatively impact our health. Develop healthy responses to stress, such as exercises, hobbies, entertainment, and quality time with friends. See your mental health professional to develop more adaptive cognitions and behaviors.

30. Set boundaries

Boundaries allow us to communicate our needs and desires and put limits on how others are allowed to behave around us. For example, suppose there is a colleague that makes you uncomfortable with their words or behavior. In that case, your task is to communicate what behavior of theirs is inappropriate and intolerable to you. This will prevent others from taking advantage of you or hurting you.

The same is true about the work-life balance. If you feel like you live to work, you need to set boundaries, too. Stick to your working hours, leave work at work, turn off working chats and avoid answering emails after work. Whenever your workday is over, switch off physically and mentally.

Build Hard Skills

31. Hone your professional skills

Now we are back to the importance of a career development plan. If you combine it with the feedback from your manager, you’ll have a clear roadmap of what you can do to become more productive at work and competitive in the market. Check with the plan regularly, read professional literature, take courses, and track industry trends. Hard skills are an integral part of your work productivity and career development.

“Knowledge applied is productivity.” – Peter Drucker

How to Build a Great Developer Portfolio (+ Examples & Tools)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ May 26 '21

#career #webdev #javascript #100daysofcode

32. Know your tools

We use dozens of tools daily: email applications, project management software, industry software, time trackers – you name it. But we often forget that every tool offers shortcuts and tiny features that could significantly improve our routines. For example, if you use Gmail, you can set up email and spam filters, create templates, set up a personal signature, and more. Explore your tools of the trade to handle routines effectively.

Ready to Increase Productivity at Work?

Workplace productivity is getting the work done in the least amount of time while maintaining the quality of work and your physical and mental well-being. In this article, we discussed concentration and performance improvement techniques, procrastination and stress management approaches, and the importance of having work and career development goals. But the most effective skill in this list is time management.

Without recording and prioritizing your tasks, tracking time, and analyzing your performance, you have no tools to measure and increase your productivity at work. The first step towards excellence is getting time and task management software. We advise you to try actiTIME – it offers a free 30-day trial with no commitments required and a free plan for individual users and teams of up to three users. Set your sail and hold tight – actiTIME will drive your productivity to uncharted horizons.

20 Productivity Tips From Developers to Developers

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:37:15 +0000

*header pic by Kelsey Wroten

Being a developer is not easy – it is a mentally demanding job that requires many soft and hard skills and a certain set of personal traits to work productively and don’t burn out. So instead of working your way through the profession on your own, you can learn from experienced developers who have faced the most common problems and have learned their lessons. By adopting their wisdom, you can save yourself dozens and hundreds of hours doing unproductive things, experience less stress and trouble and grow faster.

In this article, we’ve gathered 20 best tips from developers for other developers on how they can hack their routines and achieve more in less time. Save this article to get back to it later.

1. Know Your Integrated Development Environment

Integrated development environments (IDE) are software suites that provide basic tools required to write and test software. Best IDEs provide a central interface with all necessary features, including code editor, compiler, debugger and automation tools.

“Learn how to use your IDE. Pay attention to the refactorings it provides, learn the navigation shortcuts, learn its capabilities.” – Adam Skinner

2. Learn Command Line Interface

Command Line Interface (CLI) is a text-based interface used to run programs, manage computer files and interact with the computer. CLI allows users to interact with the system or other applications using CLI commands.

“Learn CLI commands, to search, replace, and edit on the fly.” – Joseph

3. Never Rush To Code

Developers rush to write code at the moment they receive specifications. But in reality, rushed code means that it will most likely require refactoring or cleaning up.

“Think things through (and discuss them with the user or customer when relevant) before you write any code” – leob

“Something my seniors taught me, plan first. Like really plan it in your head, writing the final thing down takes very little time. Figuring all of it out, that is what takes skill and patience” – Aman Jaiswal

“This is so true!! When I first started out, I used to be so excited to jump into the code and get lost in it. Dozens of bugs later, I could say I’m a bit more wise” – Raphael Jambalos

“In code, it never pays to rush” – Brian Marick

4. Avoid The Golden Hammer

Golden hammer anti-pattern is a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on familiar tools, languages and platforms. This approach limits your learning potential and tech experience and degrades the quality of your work. One size never really fits all.

“Avoid the golden hammer. There is no one way to do something and learn early on to formulate your options, pros and cons and pick the one that works for that situation. Also avoid cultures that enforce this “one way to do something”.” – Melvyn Sopacua

5. Review Your Commits

Pre-commit code reviews have many benefits: they help developers get timely feedback, catch bugs and bad designs, and learn from fellow developers.

“Always review your commits before you send them, you will be amazed by how many bugs you will catch of yourself before getting into someone else’s eyes. You better waste 10 minutes of your time than 1 man hour of multiple colleagues.” – Victor A. Barzana

6. But Practice Focused Learning

There’s a big controversy over whether developers should specialize or not. On one hand, the broader your knowledge, the more opportunities will be available to you. On the other hand, you are at a high risk of becoming a “jack of all trades, master of none”, suffer from impostor syndrome and developer burnout.

“Don’t try to learn “everything”, it’s a waste of time. Learn the fundamentals, then one or two languages and frameworks, and that’s it – don’t jump on every new bandwagon, ignore the fads and the hype. Specialize – life is too short, you can’t get good at a dozen things.” – leob

7. Build Side Projects

Side projects come in many forms and have lots of different purposes but they have an important thing in common: they provide numerous benefits. Side projects accelerate your learning, foster creativity, expand your developer portfolio and sometimes serve as a source of extra income.

“Hands on projects / side projects are the best way to learn a technology” – Adrian Matei

8. Write Readable Code

Readable code is one of the most important qualities of a good developer. Readable code saves developer’s time and effort by reducing debugging time and keeping it maintainable and easy-to-understand.

“Write readable code, do not comment it out if the code is self explanatory. That’s the reason why you use clear variable/method names.” – Victor A. Barzana

“Write readable and not complicated/fancy code – you’ll thank yourself later.” – Adrian Matei

9. Track Time

Developers should track their time for multiple reasons. First of all, time tracking helps developers optimize their work, identify peak productivity time, plan and prioritize their workload. Freelance developers profit twice as much: they can use time trackers to assess project profitability and bill their clients.

“Developers often feel like they are not productive enough. Most of the time, it’s not true. Use a free time tracker to record time you’ve spent on your tasks and document important actions and milestones“ – Jane

Online timesheet interface in actiTIME where every user can select task parameters they want to see in their timesheets

10. Use Buffer Time

Agile teams measure multiple developer performance metrics, including team velocity – amount of work a team can tackle during a single sprint. To understand your personal workload limits and restrictions, you can calculate your individual velocity, add little time buffers to it when estimating work activities and enjoy working at a more relaxed pace.

“Try to estimate and track the real amount of time that you spent on the task. After you’ll find personal velocity, you can control the pressure that the company is trying to put on you. For example if you know that you will complete a task in 3 hours, you can estimate it in 4 hours and have some space to think and slow down.” – Ihor Klymenok

“One really important thing I wish I was better at when I got my first job was estimating the time needed for getting something done. Not sure whether it was my overconfidence in my abilities, availability of a clear roadmap for the task in my mind (usually hindered by unexpected bugs) or both that led me to usually say less than what it actually took. Frustrated both me and my teammates before a senior helped me with this process. TLDR: Always keep a buffer when asked how much time some task will take to be done” – Anam.DevDes

11. Build Soft Skills

Writing good code is not enough – developers should also have solid non-technical skills, including communication, teamwork, time management, problem-solving, critical thinking, patience and persistence.

“Nowadays developer jobs are moving remote so it becomes important to have better collaboration and teamwork skills. Public speaking adds an advantage.” – Atharva Shirdhankar

12. Automate as Much as You Can

In his book ‘The Passionate Programmer’, Chad Fowler talks about building a great career as a software engineer and automation is one of the tips that he gives. There are many aspects of the developer’s work that can be automated. You can implement automation tools for testing, code reviewing, documentation or take a closer look at your code editor for starters.

“Automate your repetitive tasks; everything you do that can be automated. You know you’re on the right track when you use regular expressions in your code editor at least once per day on a weekly average.” – DarkWiiPlayer

13. Consider The Far End Of The Productivity Curve

Senior developers use productivity and automation tools that look and feel too complex to junior devs. So, juniors often go look and adopt alternative tools that turn out to be ineffective after they become a little more experienced. So, the tip here is to listen to your mentor and learn the tools they advise you to learn – the learning curve won’t be easy but your efforts will eventually pay off.

“Choose the tool that may slow you down at first but will help you later on. To give a hyperbolic example: One may achieve more today if they use notepad instead of vim; but if it takes you a month to learn the basics of vim, the next month of increased productivity will negate the lost time of the first month, and beyond that it’s all saved time.” – DarkWiiPlayer

14. Invest In Tools of The Trade

Just as developers invest time in learning new languages and tools, they should also take their office tools seriously. If you work in an open space environment and the noize around distracts you, you should not hesitate to buy yourself a good pair of headphones! Or if you work from a home office, you should also make sure that the tools that you use for work are comfortable and reliable.

“Invest in noise cancelling headphones. Whether you work in the office or from home, you need to concentrate to work in the flow.” – Stasy Barns

“Use standing desk and invest in the ergonomic chair” – sudarshan

15. Beware of Developer Burnout

Nearly every developer has experienced burnout, probably more than once, so most of you are aware of its catastrophic consequences, including people quitting their jobs and even dropping their careers. It’s very important to take care of yourself every day, be aware of the developer burnout symptoms and know how to recover from it.

“Learn to identify when you’re burned out. Stop working for the day, or take a nap or something. If you don’t, you’re wasting your time and possibly creating new problems for tomorrow.” – Adam Skinner

16. Practice Journaling

Journaling is a flexible and powerful tool that can take many forms and serve different purposes. You can use it for pouring out thoughts and emotion, which reduces stress and helps you cope with difficulties. Then, you can create a whole dashboard with daily bullet lists, habits trackers and more – for example, Notion serves this purpose perfectly. Whatever journaling technique you choose, it’ll most likely turn out to be beneficial to your mental health and personal growth.

“I use tables in Notion to record my sleeping, eating, sports and activity habits, track productivity and mood. It might sound like a waste of time but after you have data for a few months, you’ll see what gives you energy and life satisfaction and what drains it from you” – Jane

17. Take Breaks

Our brains are less productive without rest, and it’s especially true for knowledge workers. “Our brains are like sponges,” says Dr. Bea, psychologist. “They can only soak up so much information before they’re saturated, then they have to dry out a bit.” So make sure to schedule rest time and unwind.

“Even if you work for 12 hours a day, you’re probably only productive for around three hours. What you really need is 4 hours of deep work with regular breaks. Take a short break after working for 45-60 mins.” – Sachin N

18. Keep a Record of Your Daily Achievements

Have you ever kept a developer journal? It’s an effective tool for tracking your growth, career goals and progress, unloading your mind and more. The greatest benefit of a developer journal is the fact that you can map out your career development strategy and record your milestones and achievements. It means that you not only have great reasons to celebrate your success, but you can also rely on this evidence to gain promotion, pay rise or even get a better job.

“Write down what you’ve completed each day before going to bed.” – Sachin N

19. Don’t Be Afraid To Make Mistakes

Many developers, especially Junior developers think they are not capable of doing their job, they underestimate their abilities and are afraid to make mistakes. It’s important to remind yourself everyday that mistakes are important components of the learning process and there’s nothing bad about them. Mistakes also mean that you do your best. Because only those who don’t do anything, don’t even make mistakes.

“Recognise that, as a junior dev, you’re not yet able to write (much less understand) complex code patterns and syntax, and that’s okay. Your solution to X problem won’t be as elegant nor efficient as a dev who has 20 years of experience, and that’s okay.
It is always worth doing something badly, provided you are learning and growing while you do it. As long as you have a drive or passion for what you do, you will improve. Don’t try to rush it, enjoy the journey, never stop asking questions, and when you hit 20 years of experience (which you will eventually) remember that you are still and always will be a learner.” – Dan Walsh

“Bugs will happen. They don’t define your self-worth or competence and avoid any company culture that makes you feel worse about yourself when you leave a bug in your code. Instead: Own the bugs, analyze them (ask help from seniors if you get stuck) and learn.” – Melvyn Sopacua

20. Don’t Skip Documentation

Documentation is created to educate users about the product or software it describes. It sounds obvious, but most of us, non-developers included, tend to use the item, the software, the program right away: we tend to think that we can read the interface and figure out how everything works on our own. But when it comes to developers, it’s important that they read documentation and, more than that, refer to the official sources.

“This is not a big mistake. This is something which all programmers do all the time Including me, and that is trying to skip the documentation and trying to work with new technology by yourself. This is fairly common If you are working with tools or softwares … We just jump into the UI and start using it.
However, like Quote says that, “You can save lots of hours of debugging If you just spend 10 min of time reading the documentation”. If you are not reading the documentation you could be reading unreliable sources. you could be reading from old sources. If the documentation is available, why not just go ahead and do that ?
My best practice is to actually take official documentation If it is available or else you can stick to video tutorials or playlists. But also have an eye on what the official documentation says.” – Rajkumar Thangavel

Ready to Become an Even More Productive Developer?

What is productivity after all? Productivity is the amount of work you do per unit time. But these components and productivity measurements are not as simple as that. We can’t measure developer effort and the work done by lines of code, bugs fixed, completed tasks or any other metrics because they are not equal and their number doesn’t mean productive work. Nevertheless, time is essential for planning work and understanding how much work we accomplish in a unit time.

So, consider registering your tasks and time spent on them using time tracking software. For example, actiTIME is great for tracking working time because it provides a weekly timesheet interface, a browser extension and a mobile app. More than that, actiTIME integrates with JIRA, GitHub, JitLab and 2,000+ other integrations. Join 10,000+ companies like DHL, Philips and Xerox – try a free 30-day trial (no credit card required).

What’s Wrong With Measuring Developer Performance (+ 10 Best Metrics)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 11:54:31 +0000

*header pic by Shen Comix

Developer performance is a hot topic nowadays, especially during the COVID-19 time when most of us work from our home offices. Executives feel a strong need to measure developer productivity and introduce metrics that look obviously reliable and good from their point of view but in reality have little to no relevance to the complex work of developers, undermining their motivation and morale.

In this article, we’ll take a close look at the notion of developer performance, identify issues related to it and learn from the best gurus about how to measure developer performance and how to recognize quality metrics.

Developer Performance Metrics That Don’t Work

What’s Wrong With Measuring Developer Performance?

What is developer output?
What is developer input?
What is the 10x variation phenomenon?

How to Maximize Accuracy of Developer Performance Metrics

10 Best Developer Performance Metrics

Deployment frequency
Lead time
Cycle time
Lead time for changes
Velocity
Work-in-progress
Change failure rate
Time to restore service
Customer satisfaction score
Team health

Ready to Improve Developer Performance?

Developer Performance Metrics That Don’t Work

Developer performance refers to how well engineering teams are performing and how successful development operations of the company are.

Executives seek to measure performance in development teams for a number of reasons. Steve McConnell, project management and software engineering expert, provides the following most common reasons:

The biggest issue with measuring developer productivity nowadays is that managers introduce metrics that make little to no sense in regards to developer performance. Here are some of the most common examples of the worst developer performance metrics:

Hours worked
Lines of code
Bugs fixed
Tasks completed
Number of commits
Velocity points
Pull request count
Features shipped
Computer activity metrics

Using these metrics is very likely to be detrimental to developer morale and business growth: neither of them takes into account developer experience, business output or what programming is truly about. Just as lines of code don’t reflect the developer's efforts, number of bugs fixed don’t mean better quality software and low keyboard or mouse activity doesn’t mean anything at all. Instead, these metrics invite developers to game them by writing unnecessary code, creating buggy software or even writing scripts to simulate computer activity.

Eric Newport • Feb 4 '21

Companies that do this are awful. I know someone who works at such a company and has invested time in writing scripts to simulate activity with random mouse movements and keypresses and such out of fear of being seen as idle at the wrong time of day. Pretty much exhibit A of a hostile work environment.

Now let’s see why developer performance is so hard to measure, why most executives use bad developer performance metrics and are there any reliable metrics at all.

What’s Wrong With Measuring Developer Performance?

Let’s start with the definition of productivity, which equals output divided by input.

Productivity = Output / Input

This formula looks simple, but many issues related to measuring developer productivity can be resolved by referring back to this definition, in particular, to what we mean by input and output in the work of a developer. If any of these components are defined incorrectly, then productivity won’t be measured objectively.

What is developer output?

What should be considered as the output of the developer’s work? Is it lines of code because it’s exactly what developers produce? Is it function points? Or is it bugs fixed? On the contrary, these metrics have little to no relevance to the economics of the business and don’t reflect any degree of developer effort by themselves.

If we remove the business economics from the definition of the output, we’ll get the definition of productivity that is isolated from business profits. Let’s say work on a project was completed successfully but the product turned out to be a total failure on the market so it has no potential to generate any revenue. Judging from this perspective, does it matter if the project was completed on time and the work of developers was effective?

What is developer input?

Input refers to the investments made by developers, such as time and effort. Comparing time across activities makes no sense, because developer activities are more than sets of similar tasks - they involve different degrees of complexity, collaboration and other factors that undermine the reliability of the time metric alone.

Or how do we measure the developer effort? Activity tracking software attempted to measure “productive” user behavior by registering mouse clicks, keyboard taps, types of apps and websites used and time spent on them. While it is a minimal unit of the developer activity, it has nothing to do with productivity or effort.

If you investigate further into possible inputs and outputs, you will neither be able to define what developer input and output are, meaning you are very unlikely to choose reliable developer performance metrics. More than that, accuracy of these measurements is very likely to be subject to the 10x variation phenomenon.

What is the 10x variation phenomenon?

In 1968, Sackman, Erickson and Grant conducted a study where they tried to measure whether people were more productive when programming online or offline. They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found the following:

Range of initial coding times: 20:1
Range of debugging times: 25:1
Range of program sizes produces: 5:1
Range of program execution speeds: 10:1

What they found is that they were unable to determine which group of programmers was more productive because individual productivity differences drowned out differences attributable to online and offline performance. So, differences found in coding time, debugging time, and program size all support a general claim of differences in productivity, i.e., a 10x difference.

A number of similar studies has been taken since 1968. Take a look at their productivity ratios for teams and individuals.

All these studies prove that the differences in productivity are very high on both individual and team levels, which produce the following conclusions:

The results of these studies proved that if we measure the impact of a process, practice or environmental factor, the measurements will be subject to the 10x individual variation factor, meaning that they are very unlikely to be valid.
And if we try to assess individual or team productivity, these measurements will be confounded by process, practice or environmental differences between projects.

How to Maximize Accuracy of Developer Performance Metrics

The good news is that we can maximize the accuracy of the metrics. Steve McConnell developed a list of attributes for identifying reliable performance metrics. More than that, he evaluated the most commonly used team-level developer performance measurements according to them:

So, the leading measurement is scorecard: it contains a set of developer performance metrics, which makes it highly reliable and accurate in terms of reflecting productivity. If you include metrics that account for work input of the whole team and reflect the acquired business value, your scorecard will display the most accurate developer performance evaluation with the 10x individual variation factor kept to the minimum.

Even if you don’t want to introduce scorecards, the biggest lesson is to rely on a set of metrics accounting for developer input and output and avoid individual metrics such as lines of code (the most unreliable according to Steve McConnell’s evaluations), tasks completed, commits made or features shipped.

So, let's see what are the best developer performance metrics you might want to start tracking in your team of developers.

10 Best Developer Performance Metrics?

Below, we’ve combined 10 best developer performance metrics for teams recognized by Google (the 4 DORA metrics), Abi Noda - Senior Product Manager at GitHub and Roy Osherove - author of Art of Unit Testing and Notes to a Software Team Leader with over 20 years in technical & testing roles.

1. Deployment frequency (DORA)

What it measures: How often an organization successfully releases to production.

Measurement: Deployments per day

Impact potential: Increase customer value by reduced Time-to-Market

2. Lead time

What it measures: How much time is between the beginning of a project’s development and its delivery to the customer

Measurement: Lead time in days

Impact potential: Increase project planning accuracy

3. Cycle time (Roy Osherove)

What it measures: How much time do individual project stages take

Measurement: Cycle time in days

Impact potential: Increase project planning accuracy

4. Lead time for changes (DORA)

What it measures: How much time it takes a commit to get into production

Measurement: Lead time in days

Impact potential: Increase developer efficiency

5. Velocity (Agile metric)

What it measures: The amount of work that your team can accomplish in a given amount of time (sprint)

Measurement: Man-hours or story points

Impact potential: Improve project and sprint planning

6. Work-in-progress (Agile metric)

What it measures: The the state of the work in progress

Measurement: Number of tasks in progress

Impact potential: Identify bottlenecks and sunk costs

7. Change failure rate (DORA)

What it measures: The percentage of deployments leading to a degradation in service that must be addressed

Measurement: Number of incidents divided by number of deployments

Impact potential: Increase customer satisfaction by decreased number of outages

8. Time to restore service (DORA)

What it measures: How long it takes an organization to recover from a failure in
production

Measurement: Restore Time in hours

Impact potential: Increase customer satisfaction by decreased number of outages

9. Customer satisfaction score

What it measures: How satisfied a customer with your products or services

Measurement: Surveys with scales and open questions

Impact potential: Improve customer relations and satisfaction

10. Team health (Agile)

What it measures: Distribution of work among team members

Measurement: Work items distribution in terms of type and quantity

Impact potential: Create fair team workload distribution

Ready to Improve Developer Performance

Measuring developer performance is not easy: you need to track project management metrics, calculate business costs and profits, and rely on time metrics to plan your projects with the maximum accuracy. Nowadays, you can do most of these things in time and project management systems.

For example, actiTIME provides a time and project management system where you can manage workloads, review project progress, see business costs and profits and more.

Build custom workflows, assign tasks to your team members and see how time and money costs are distributed across tasks, project stages, projects and clients.

Set up deadlines, time estimates, time or cost budgets. Create custom fields for tasks to upgrade your time, cost and performance reports and see how similar items perform.

Choose from 2,000+ integrations, including JIRA, GitHub and JitLab. Join 10,000+ companies like DHL, Huawei, Philips and Xerox - try a free 30-day trial (no credit card required).

5 Tips On How to Measure And Maximize Developer Productivity

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 21:59:16 +0000

*header pic by Shen Comix

Developer productivity refers to the ability of developers to create high-quality software that works well and is easy to maintain in a time-effective manner. With the COVID-19 pandemic and a massive switch to home offices, businesses have been taking an increased interest in ways to increase developer productivity, including helping developers work in the flow and preventing them from burning out.

Unfortunately, instead of measuring developer productivity, many businesses have introduced micromanagement practices decreasing job performance, teamwork, innovation and increasing turnover instead. Let’s see why developer productivity is so hard to measure, which metrics are effective and why.

What’s Wrong With Measuring Developer Productivity?

Hours worked
Lines of code
Bugs fixed, tasks completed or features shipped
Computer activity

How to Measure & Maximize Developer Productivity?

1. Measure qualitative metrics
2. Keep record of quantitative metrics
3. Check with professional development plan
4. Evaluate their contribution to business goals
5. Trust your manager’s gut

Developer Productivity Starts Here

What’s Wrong With Measuring Developer Productivity?

To maximize profits, businesses strive to evaluate developer productivity by introducing quantitative performance metrics such as lines of code, hours, tickets, defect rate or accuracy of estimation. Let’s dig into the reasons why these metrics are not effective.

Hours worked

Number of worked hours is the most commonly used productivity metric. While it’s important for project planning, especially when combined with estimating, it still doesn’t reflect how productive your team of developers has been. Like they say, being busy is not the same as being productive and working hours is exactly about the “busy time”.

If this metric was effective, then we could get 125% of the work done if we’d work for 10 hours instead of 8 daily – that’s just maths. But in reality, our productivity drops after a certain threshold, which is proved by studies. This relation between time and output is also known in Economics as the law of diminishing marginal returns: after some optimal level of production adding an additional factor of production (number of working hours) causes a decrease in productivity and decrease in return of production.

So, if your team works a standard 40-hour workweek and you need to see how these hours are distributed across activities, tracking working hours and reviewing how they are spread across tasks is effective for workload planning and team management. But excessive attention to details and minor activities neither offers capacity for productivity boosting, nor improves team morale.

Lines of code

Some businesses think that lines of code is the direct product of the developer’s work: every line solves a problem and is by definition better than no code at all, so it must be a great developer productivity metric. But in reality it is the same trap of thinking as measuring doctor’s productivity by the number of patients they’ve had.

Why using lines of code as a productivity metric is a bad idea:

It’s contrary to what programming is about: reducing code length and complexity.
It doesn’t take developer experience into account. Experienced developers often use fewer lines of code than their less experienced peers for the same functionality.
It doesn’t take into account the differences in languages. The same code could be written a dozen different ways and each taking up a different number of lines of code.
It is an easy metric to game. Developers will be able to earn monthly salaries in a few days writing tons of unnecessary code and generate no business value.
It sabotages the code review process making it more time-consuming.
More lines of code ≠ more performant solution. Shorter code can work faster.
Tons of code is hard to maintain. Unnecessary code is hard to read and maintain. Moreover, every new line of code adds to a chance of being more buggy.
Sometimes to delete code is the most productive solution.
Copied-and-pasted code leads to massive technical debt, poor design and higher chance of bugs.

Most importantly, measuring developer productivity with lines of code affects the performance and morale of the developers and will require time and effort to expand their code with unnecessary complexity.

Bugs fixed, tasks completed or features shipped

Productivity metrics like bugs, tasks and features are essentially as ineffective as lines of code are but are harder to game.

If developer productivity is measured by the number of bugs fixed, then they can write intentionally buggy software. Just like in this comic strip by Scott Adams:

If their goal is to ship as many features as possible, they can do it too using low-quality code piling up technical debt and making the product hardly maintainable. If developers need to finish as many tasks as possible, they will take on the easiest or the most overestimated tasks. You get the idea.

Computer activity

With the massive switch to remote work, many businesses became anxious about not being in control over their teams. They suspect that developers might slack off, fabricate worked hours in JIRA or in their timesheet software or be away during the working hours. This gave rise to a massive trend on employee monitoring software that records user activity in apps and tools, keystroke activity, emails, messengers and more. Based on this data, the software calculates productivity scores and highlights top performers.

The ratings below the charts display top productive, unproductive and effective employees based on their activity level and app usage

The biggest issue with activity tracking software is that neither of the tracked metrics are relevant to developer productivity, business performance or its customers. Would you apply disciplinary actions to a top performing developer who doesn’t use their mouse or keyboard enough? Would you promote a developer who spends a lot of time typing in Visual Studio, even if they’re difficult to work with? Makes no sense, right?

How to Measure & Maximize Developer Productivity?

1. Measure qualitative metrics

If you ask Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob Martin, Steve McConnell, Joel Spolsky or any other development luminary, neither of them could single out the most important developer productivity metric or develop a performance measurement system based on the quantitative metrics alone. Back in 2003, Martin Fowler admitted that measuring developer productivity is nearly impossible and false measures only make things worse. In 2020, Steve McConnell in his keynotes still calls developer productivity one of the most elusive objectives.

Most important factors contributing to developer productivity can not be measured. These include job satisfaction, training and development, employee engagement, goals and expectations, tools and equipment, morale and company culture. To measure these, take employee surveys regularly.

Questions to consider:

Create a questionnaire where developers can evaluate their performance, job satisfaction, goals and expectations, tools and equipment, morale and other parameters.
Share this list with the team lead and go through the list yourself if you are a manager to evaluate your team members.
Compare the results to see you and your developer team are on the same page. Pay close attention to evaluations that don’t match.

2. Keep record of quantitative metrics

Tracking how developers spend their time is proven to maximize resources and improve developer performance. Another solid reason to keep a record of tasks and time spent is to document bad performance so that you can back up your decision in case termination is necessary. To make this data even more compelling, you can sort this data by activity types in your time tracking system to review developer performance across similar tasks.

Custom Fields report in actiTIME, where you can review time expenses across multiple custom types of tasks

If you notice any anomalies, review task comments and time entry notes or ask the developer to discover the reasons. Were there any unforeseen circumstances such as underestimated complexity of the task or the change of priorities? If not, dig into the task details to review the amount of completed work and discuss the reasons of the poor performance with the developer.

Questions to consider:

How often did they miss deadlines? Why?
How accurate are their task estimates?
How much time does it usually take them to finish certain types of tasks? How can it be improved?
Do they record their hours daily? If not, communicate the importance of doing so.
How often did they work overtime? Why?
How often did they call in sick or requested other types of absences? Were they reasonable?
Can you identify a pattern?

3. Check with professional development plan

One of the best practices of managing developer teams is when managers build professional development plans for each of their team members.

Professional development plan documents goals, skills and competencies required for successful career development and meeting business needs. It provides managers with metrics for measuring developer performance and allows developers to get a clear picture of the skills and technologies they need to master as well as goals they need to achieve with their work. Check this plan every few months and have one-on-one meetings to review and discuss developer performance.

Questions to consider:

How often did the developer use their skills? What competencies did they appy most often?
How their skills affected work goals, workflow and project success?
What difficulties did they encounter? How did those difficulties affect their work and workflow?
What has improved over the evaluation period?
If a developer didn’t meet personal and business goals, should you offer them additional training?
What needs to be improved in the work of an individual developer?

4. Evaluate their contribution to business goals

Professional development plan should include not only personal career goals but also align with business goals. To evaluate developer performance in terms of business contribution, go through the following list of questions.

Questions to consider:

What successes did the business achieve, and how did this developer contribute to them? Did they properly use their key skills?
Have they achieved or even exceeded the desired metrics and indicators?
Was the result of the work so outstanding that it is worth highlighting this developer?
Has this developer played a key role in achieving the team’s goals?

5. Trust your manager’s gut

Managers work so closely with their teams that they develop good judgement through experience, learning and trust. So you might intuitively know who are the good, productive developers, who is average and who needs to shape up or ship out. Embrace that subjectivity. You should be able to tell who are superstars in your team and who needs to improve, off the top of your head.

Developer Productivity Starts Here

Productive use of time is the most important component of developer productivity and successful project delivery. Consider implementing a time tracking system that can do both – serve as a project management tool and record developer performance.

For example, actiTIME allows managers to distribute the workload across their team, specify task details and review time and money expenses across clients and projects. Get your team members to record their time across activities, change task status, add time log notes and more using online timesheet, browser extension or a mobile app. actiTIME supports 2,000+ integrations, including JIRA, GitHub, JitLab and Trello. Try actiTIME for free with a 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Productivity Tips From Developers to Developers

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 22:30:55 +0000

*header pic by Shen Comix

Remember when you were a junior dev and you didn't know how to progress faster, what productivity tools and appoaches to use, what kind of mindset you need to adopt. What tips and tools would you give to a younger self? What important lessons did you learn as a dev?

Please, share in the comments!
I'll pick some of your answers for my next article.

How to Help Developers Work in The Flow

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 12:39:36 +0000

Developer’s job is one of the most mentally demanding jobs. Developers work with complex algorithms, juggle multiple things in their short-term memory and do many other mental operations to write code, and any interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. To operate effectively, they need to be focused and concentrated every second or, if lucky enough, work in the state of flow.

Also known as “the zone,” flow is a mental state in which a person is fully immersed into the activity at hand while experiencing a feeling of energized focus and enjoyment. It’s a magical feeling when your knowledge, motivation and concentration align to produce maximum performance. If your developer team hardly if ever works in the state of flow, it means that you need to review your workplace policies and management approaches.

In this article, we’ll dwell on the flow state phenomenon, review workplace trends that prevent your team members from working in the flow and provide a list of advice on how to help developers deliver maximum results.

The Psychology of Flow State
Depressing State of Workplace Interruptions
Flow State Killers
How to Help Developers Work in The Flow

How to Improve Clarity
How to Enhance Focus
How to Increase Energy

How to Manage Teams Without Interrupting Their Flow?

The Psychology of Flow State

The flow state was introduced and popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – a positive psychologist and author of the landmark Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He defines flow as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” It is characterized by the state of deep focus where you lose track of time and make the best of your skills with little to no effort. People who have experienced flow describe the following feelings:

Focused and concentrated involvement in the activity
Ecstatic feeling of being outside everyday reality
Clarity about what to do and how to do it
Confidence in your skills
A sense of serenity
Time flies by very quickly
Inner motivation to deliver results.

Thanks to modern neuroscience, we know that during the flow state, the human brain produces pleasure-inducing and performance-enhancing chemicals that enable us to better process information and enjoy the activity. According to Steven Kotler, executive director of Flow Research Collective, a study done by the Flow Genome Project revealed that flow state increases creativity by 500–700%.

Benefits of the flow state can be summarized as follows:

Improved learning and skill development. The flow state is attainable only if activity requires better skills, posing positive challenges and providing opportunities for growth.
Enhanced performance. A 10-year study showed that people in the flow state were 500% more productive.
More creativity. According to a study conducted at the University of Sydney, the state of flow increases creative problem solving.
Increased engagement because people in the flow state are more immersed into their activities.
Greater enjoyment and fulfillment. Working in the flow state feels effortless and rewarding, which increases satisfaction.
Enhanced intrinsic motivation. Enjoyment brings intrinsic motivation to do things for internal rewards.

Now imagine if you could achieve all these benefits with your team: it would improve employee satisfaction and increase productivity several times! But in reality, modern workplaces and management approaches pose multiple obstacles preventing teams from working in the flow.

Depressing State of Workplace Interruptions

Workplace is the biggest flow killer. Studies show that an average employee experiences about 87 interruptions per day or spends only 3 minutes on a task before being interrupted. Another study conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology revealed that it takes an average of about 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. If we put this data together, we’ll get the following graph illustrating concentration trends of an average worker.

If you ask developers, one of the most annoying things for them is getting interrupted in the middle of a difficult task. A famous cartoon strip by Jason Heeris illustrates what happens inside the mind of a developer who has been distracted.

Joel Spolsky, a co-founder of Stack Overflow, once said: “Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short-term memory all at once. Any interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can’t remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.”

The number two reason why developers don’t achieve the flow state is that they interrupt themselves. Some studies suggest that self-interruptions like task-switching are more disruptive than external interruptions. Some sources, along with Joel Spolsky, claim that programmers get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day.

I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I’ve always been one of the most productive members of the team. – Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow

And number three reason that gets in the developers’ way of achieving the flow state are managers and their management approaches. But before we dwell on practical advice for managers, let’s see what things prevent people from getting into the flow state.

Flow State Killers

Flow is a state of consciousness on the verge of mental arousal and control. It takes about 15-25 minutes of undivided attention to reach it, but it doesn’t happen every time and if it does, distractions break it in seconds. Many developers hardly ever reach the state of flow if they are distracted by the following anti-flow emotions: anxiety, worry, anger, apathy, boredom, relaxation. Let’s see some examples of events and circumstances that cause these emotions:

Worry and anxiety caused by unrealistic task estimates and deadlines.
Being upset by personal or professional issues. For example, working in a company that doesn’t provide fair rewards and doesn’t understand the needs of the employee.
Not being interested in a task or a project because it’s not challenging enough.

These unbalanced circumstances can take away energy (This work is so repetitive, I don’t feel like learning anything new at all. I don’t know how to do it.), focus (I can’t concentrate with that chit-chat in the background. I can’t stop thinking about that nasty comment of my colleague’s) or clarity (What do I want this to look like? It’s more complicated than it looks, can I actually get it done?). So, they can be summarized as follows:

Clarity killers: fuzzy goals, unclear expectations, sketchy plans, feeble time planning.
Focus killers: overwhelm, inner and environmental distractions, interruptions.
Energy killers: boredom, anxiety, impatience, exhaustion.

To identify issues preventing your team from working in the flow, you can refer to the following flow model. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, if the challenge of a task is roughly equal to the skill level of the person executing it, it creates the best circumstance to achieve maximum productivity and get the most enjoyment and satisfaction from the job.

Ask your team of developers to identify the point on the graph that most resonates with how they feel about their work. If they put their point in the top left corner, it means that they are anxious or stressed, so they need to improve their skills to get back to the Flow Channel. If their point is in the bottom-right corner, you need to assign them more difficult and responsible tasks so that they could work to their potential and grow.

“Usually people will fall into boredom because their skillset has increased. They’ve taken a leap forward, they’ve learned a lot. Maybe they just shipped something or conquered an obstacle, and now they don’t feel like they’re being challenged,” – Dr. Cynthia Maxwell, Engineer at Netflix.

Hold one-on-one meetings with each team member to discuss their flow chart results and work out individual and major improvements in workload distribution, workplace policies, time and project management of your team. Hold these interviews regularly, let’s say every three months, to review the trends and review the performance of introduced improvements.

Let’s see what you can do as a manager to help developers work in the flow state more often.

How to Help Developers Work in The Flow

Many managers make the same mistake: they push their team to perform better instead of creating conditions and environments necessary for employees to perform at their best. Instead of putting figures and performance metrics first, you need to prioritize employees’ needs and quality performance will follow. High productivity is not a goal but a consequence of a wise management strategy that meets the interests of both parties.

“The question is: how to get your team more into their work, not get more work out of them” – Dr. Cynthia Maxwell, Engineer at Netflix

Since we put all the flow killers into three groups, it means that we’ve identified the three essential components of the flow state. Let’s see what managers can do to prevent flow state killers and provide developer teams with maximum energy, focus and clarity.

How to Improve Clarity

Clarify priorities. Update your team on the project progress and priorities regularly. Emphasize how individual developers contribute to the project development and what their priorities are inside their work scopes.
Set realistic goals. Managers are not business speakers: your task is not to give inspiring speeches but to set realistic expectations for your team. Use previous performance data to plan their workload more accurately.

“People want to work for a cause not for a living.” – Cal Newport

Ensure visibility and transparency. Foster close collaboration and boundless knowledge-sharing to avoid silos, roadblocks and project delays. Implement time and project management systems where each member of your team can review project progress and collaborate.
Match challenges with adequate personal skills. According to the Flow theory, if the gap between the challenge and ability is too broad, people get anxious and stressed. If stressed for an extended period of time, employees tend to burn out. So, assign challenging tasks to those developers whose skills match the complexity of the challenge or a little bit lower than required.
Create knowledge-sharing repositories. Start a community-based repository where developers can share their knowledge and answer FAQs. This will reduce the number of workplace distractions and provide a means to get information without interrupting the flow.
Break work into smaller chunks. Too big tasks that last week after week may feel overwhelming to your team members as they don’t feel like they make any progress. Instead, break them into manageable sub-tasks.

How to Enhance Focus

Consider Scrum methodology. Scrum has several advantages over Agile development in terms of achieving the flow state. It fosters self-organizing teams and immediate feedback through daily stand-up meetings.
Hold daily stand-up meetings. Stand-up meetings provide transparency and involve social risk, which is a positive stressor pushing the performance limits of individual developers.
Build collaboration. Allow developers to share problems that are upsetting or causing anxiety. Encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing to eliminate knowledge gaps and foster communication.
Introduce positive stress – situations that feel stressful in a positive manner: developers feel like they can handle it, despite feeling challenged. These stressors should be short-term, energizing and lie within our coping ability. For example, social stress at daily stand-up meetings: providing no task updates a few meetings in a row feels bad but motivates to achieve results.

The Yerkes-Dodson law graph illustrating the relationship between the optimal state of arousal and optimal performance

Don’t use KPIs. KPIs are one of the most annoying things for developers. And it’s not surprising because KPIs cause long-term stress that causes negative stress and negatively affects performance.
Have no meeting days. Set a day a week without meetings to guarantee developers uninterrupted time to focus.
Support group diversity. Different-minded teams pose positive challenges generating a wider variety of approaches to problem-solving and fostering innovative thinking.
Design a better working environment. Establish guidelines that regulate distractions and distraction-proof time in the office.
Encourage developers to record their trains of thought or document their code after they get interrupted.
Take care of developers who feel unsafe or judged. Members of minority groups who feel unwelcome or unappreciated will struggle to concentrate and won’t be able to reach a state of flow.
Offer flexibility but set boundaries. Respect the individual rhythms of your employees by encouraging them to control their time and manage their energy. Offer flexible working hours, personalized working spaces and more but set boundaries.

How to Increase Energy

Reduce micromanagement. Micromanagement breaks the morale, introduces unnecessary interruptions and kills proactive attitude. Instead, give developers space to manage their resources and show their skills.
Encourage self-leadership. Create an environment where everyone is allowed to contribute their expertise at any given time to encourage group flow.

The greater the decision-making power of an employee is, the greater his commitment to his role will be. This will translate into increased levels of performance and job satisfaction

Incorporate immediate feedback. Constant feedback assures that developers are on the right track and gives them specific ways to stretch their limits — just the kind of balance that can produce a flow state.
Provide meaningful and personalized recognition. Write personal notes, express verbal recognition, motivate developers with financial incentives.
Allow employees to innovate and to explore without fear of making mistakes. Mistakes are not failures but opportunities to learn and innovate. Allow this kind of risk where possible.
Encourage equal participation. Group flow is more likely to occur when team members play an equal role and have comparable skill levels. If one of the team members shows dominance or arrogance, group flow is blocked.

How to Manage Teams Without Interrupting Their Flow?

To summarize, effective project management that encourages individual and team flow involves trust and encourages developers to be proactive, take the initiative and offer solutions. It includes knowledge sharing, feedback, collaboration and rules out ego, dominance, arrogance, micromanagement and KPI. Effective project manager creates an environment where goals and needs of developers and stakeholders are met in a balanced manner and uses tools to keep track of what’s going on in their team.

If you are looking for a flow-friendly time management solution, consider actiTIME – software that makes productivity tracking effortless and stress-free. actiTIME won’t bother you with pop-ups or annoying notifications and provide you with three different modes of recording working hours: web interface, browser extension and mobile app. In actiTIME, managers can build custom workflows and complex projects, calculate payrolls and project costs, manage remote worker and employee absences. Explore the whole set of features with a free 30-day trial or request a product demo to get a product tour and find out if it’s a good fit for your needs.

How to Prevent or Recover from Developer Burnout

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 07:38:28 +0000

Most ambitious developers follow the same pattern: they do 9-to-5 jobs, participate in hackathons and events, build their personal brands on social media and get even more passionate and motivated by the feeling of rapid professional growth. Soon after that, they start to experience mental fatigue, emotional numbness and loss of motivation, which they tend to ignore. These red flags keep on growing in number until developers feel overwhelmed and unable to code.

Read on to learn about the red flags of developer burnout, practical advice on how to prevent it and actionable steps of how to overcome burnout, recover from the damage and become even more steadfast than before.

Symptoms of Burnout

Physical Symptoms
Emotional Symptoms
Behavioral Symptoms

Causes of Burnout

Work-Related Causes of Burnout
Lifestyle Causes of Burnout
Personality Traits Contributing to Burnout

How to Prevent or Recover from Burnout

Career Advice
Time Management Advice
Lifestyle Advice
Self-Care Advice

How to Beat Burnout?

Symptoms of Burnout

Burnout is a state of physical, emotional and mental collapse caused by stress or overwork. It is not a medical condition, but it still has severe effects on quality of life. Burnout manifests itself in different ways for different people. But one thing is for sure: burnout doesn’t happen overnight, but it creeps up on you. To prevent burnout effectively, you need to notice the symptoms early on and address them as soon as possible. Let’s see what symptoms may indicate that you are burning out.

Physical Symptoms

Physical fatigue. Sitting at the desk in front of a computer for 8+ hours per day is bad for your health: it causes body pain, headache, eye strain and more. If you don’t get enough physical activity, fatigue and lethargy become the norm. To beat this condition, many developers indulge in energy drinks and stay up late, feeling even more exhausted for the next few days.
Mental fatigue. Programming is a cognitively demanding job that requires you to solve complex problems. If you don’t take breaks, the fatigue accumulates. If you don’t switch activities and let your brains rest, the fatigue will eventually take its toll.
Lowered immunity. Mental and physical fatigue makes you less productive, increasing your levels of stress. Being exposed to stress for an extended period of time lowers your immune system and makes you more susceptible to colds and the flu.
Change in appetite or sleep habits. A lack of proper sleep, use of stimulants, accumulated stress and anxiety are most likely to influence your eating or sleep habits. For example, you may try to eat away your anxiety by having more snacks throughout the day, which may lead to overeating and weight gain, or sleep for 10-12 hours a day and still feel tired.
Frequent body aches. Body tensions, joint and muscle pain may appear not only due to low physical activity but also be caused by anxiety and exhaustion – one of the key symptoms of burnout.

Emotional Symptoms

Feeling pressured or exhausted. Physical, emotional and cognitive exhaustion are central symptoms of burnout that undermine the ability to work. They can stem from internal factors, for example, when you notice the decline in motivation and performance and your inner perfectionist and critic pushes you to work even harder. Or it can originate from external factors such as toxic organizational culture, intense time pressure or heavy workload.
Sense of failure and self-doubt. Let’s say you open your code editor but don’t feel like coding and it’s happening continuously for weeks. Such decline in your work performance can make you engage in negative self-talk, minimize personal accomplishments and think that you are not good enough for this job, or even consider switching your career.
Detachment, feeling alone in the world. You may notice self-deprecating thoughts running through your head. For example, you may struggle to maintain the productivity level and feel like there’s none there to help you with it. You don’t know what to do but feel like you have to deal with it on your own.
Depersonalization: cynicism and indifference. According to WHO, cynicism, also known as depersonalization, is a symptom of burnout. It’s when you feel detached or even callous towards your colleagues, projects and clients. The most common reasons for it are high workload, workplace unfairness and conflict. If this symptom persists, chances are that you lost enjoyment in your work and are burning out.

Behavioral Symptoms

Inefficiency and reduced performance refer to the feeling of incompetence and a lack of productivity, achievement and recognition. If you feel exhausted and unmotivated, you may worry that you won’t be able to handle specific tasks and situations, which is usually true: either you are too exhausted to deliver high-quality results, or you don’t have clear expectations, enough feedback and recognition, or both. If your manager leaves you wondering about your quality of work, it drains your motivation and energy.
Withdrawing from responsibilities. When drained and in doubt of your skills, you are most likely to procrastinate and avoid taking on responsibility to avoid possible failure.
Absenteeism. If you notice the tendency to come late at work or take multiple sick days or day-offs, then chances are you are burned out. Consider discussing this issue with your manager before they reach out to you concerned about your absence pattern.
Isolating yourself from others. You may no longer want to talk to friends or coworkers, decline invitations, become angry when someone speaks to you or even come in early or leave late to avoid interactions. When you feel overwhelmed and exhausted by your job, it seems like you no longer have energy for socializing, which translates social isolation into loneliness and aggravates burnout.
Food or alcohol abuse. Burnout is most often accompanied by stress, anxiety or depression that you may want to eat or drink away. If you have many snacks during the day or spend every evening in a bar, it means that it’s time to take a break and face the problem.

Causes of Burnout

To understand how to prevent or overcome burnout, first, we need to understand its causes. Even though IT jobs are not considered stressful, there are more reasons not related to work. Burnout is a multifaceted issue that requires a multifaceted solution.

Let’s see what factors contribute to burnout. Use them as a checklist to recognize burnout tendencies that require your attention.

Work-Related Causes of Burnout

Workload that exceeds your capacity. If you’ve been pushing yourself for too long to meet the demands of increased workload, start to lose motivation in your work and feel chronically exhausted, chances are you’ve already crossed that threshold and are nearing burnout.
Lack of autonomy. If your manager requires constant progress updates from you, i.e., micromanages you, you may experience a decrease in engagement and trust, which in the long run will lead to burnout.
Chaotic environment. You feel like the priorities and requirements are constantly shifting and you can’t get a grasp on them. Or you don’t feel like you get a predictable amount of time and resources to get your work done effectively.
Mismatch between invested efforts and rewards. You put in a lot of effort to get the most of your work and deliver quality results, but you don’t get enough appreciation or payment, which makes it look like your efforts are not worth the payoff.
Stagnation. Monotonous and unchallenging assignments cause feelings of apathy and boredom and don’t contribute to job satisfaction. If you feel stuck, consider it a red flag.

Unsupportive or toxic community. How trusting and supportive are your relationships with colleagues and clients? Do you notice any passive-aggressive behavior coming from or towards you? Then it’s time to rethink your work relationships.
Unfairness. Do you receive fair and equitable treatment? Or does your work go unnoticed? Do others take credit for your work? This behavior can be both intentional or not. Speaking up is your only chance to sort things out.
Values mismatch. You might have missed the part where during the job interview, your boss highlighted values, ideas and motivations that are foreign to you. Or they might have switched them in the process so that now you don’t feel aligned with the company values. Ask yourself: do you feel good about it?
Work from home. Telecommuting contributes to social isolation, inability to disconnect from work, lack of support and appreciation, which accumulate and decrease job satisfaction in around 69% of remote workers.
Lack of visible results. You’ve been working hard on functionality that is not visible on the front-end and not appreciated by clients, so you don’t feel like your work matters.
Work put on the backburner. It is often the case, especially in the Agile environment, when developers put a lot of effort into a feature that is never released due to the changes in the project plans or requirement specifications.

Lifestyle Causes of Burnout

“Type A” personality. If you are an achiever who tends to take on a lot of responsibility and be overly competitive, you are more prone to stress and feeling overwhelmed.
Poor work-life balance. You devote most of your time to work, putting relationships and hobbies on hold and increasing chances of mental fatigue.
Lack of meaningful relationships. If you have people to spend an evening at the bar with but no close relationships, you may experience a lack of love and support.
Not taking enough care of your body. This is especially true for young people who don’t take their health seriously. Lack of exercise, poor eating and sleeping habits don’t take its toll right away but accumulate and eventually get out of control.
Not taking your feelings and wishes seriously. This is one of the top reasons why psychology services are so popular nowadays: we get so immersed into work and money-making that we tend to ignore our true wishes and feelings, which leads to burnout.

Personality Traits Contributing to Burnout

Perfectionism causes self-doubt and stress, which may drain your energy and make you cynical about the work.
Pessimism. Pessimists tend to see the world as threatening, which causes anxiety and stress, making them vulnerable to burnout.
Reluctance to delegate. You may fear that delegation will take a lot of time, that others will mess up or take the credit for work. Whatever the reason why you refuse to delegate, you are most likely to end up taking a lot on your shoulders and burn out in the process of dealing with it.

How to Prevent or Recover from Burnout

All the advice on how to deal with burnout mentioned in scientific articles and self-help books can be summarized in the following three steps:

Recognize the warning signs of burnout (download the checklist or save this article)
Reverse the damage: seek support and manage stress
Build resilience by taking care of your physical and emotional health or even changing your job to prevent the symptoms from accumulating and affecting your wellbeing

Now that we know that work, lifestyle and personality traits may cause burnout, let’s see what we can do about them to prevent or recover from burnout effectively. Save this article to get back to it anytime.

Career Advice

Work-related problems are the most common causes of burnout. These may include project management issues, your career attitude, toxic work environment, lack of career growth opportunities and more. So let’s see what you can do about your work to maintain a healthy relationship with your work and advance in your career.

Recalibrate your compass. Review your current job and career. Where are you going? What do you need to get there? Does your job and opportunities at hand bring you closer to your goals?
Review your job responsibilities. What do you like to do and what would you delegate? What new responsibilities would you like to try? Think about what you’d like to improve about your current job and discuss it with your manager.
Expand your professional horizons. Block time in your schedule to learn new skills or build your own project. Venture beyond your comfort zone step-by-step and allow these small daily efforts to accumulate and turn into a better job or promotion in the future.
Reduce exposure to job stressors. Identify relationships and activities that trigger stress at work. Discuss activities that cause anxiety or pressure with your boss, establish boundaries with colleagues to manage relationship stress.
Seek out connections. Develop continual personal and professional relationships with colleagues, coaches, mentors that will contribute to your emotional and career wellbeing. Try volunteering to switch environments and network.
Update your CV and portfolio. Even if you are not going to quit your job, updating your CV will help you take a broad perspective on your career, review your recent achievements and skills and figure out your next steps.
Sign up for industry events. Attend meetups and conferences to meet like-minded people, learn about industry trends and technology, get a fresh perspective on your career.

Best Upcoming Online Conferences for Developers (Most of Them Free)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Jun 6 '21

#career #productivity #startup #techtalks

Invest in your tools. Replace an old chair that gives you backache with a new comfortable one. Get a PC that won’t crash after you open ten tabs in Google Chrome. Invest in high-quality headphones that will block away the noise.
Have a conversation with your manager. Discuss your responsibilities and workload, your next assignments and pay raise, ask for their feedback and share your concerns relating to projects, priorities, deadlines.
Consider changing projects or jobs. If you are stuck doing a tediuos and soul-sucking project or job, schedule a meeting with your manager to discuss other job responsibilities and project opportunities. If nothing aligns with your interests or values, consider quitting this job.

Time Management Advice

Time management is an underrated skill that allows you to advance in your career faster and manage your time and activities outside of work. So, if you are struggling with work-life balance and personal productivity, and look to become more disciplined and achieve more in less time, consider the following tips.

Get a schedule. Most of us use schedules to plan work-related tasks, but you can create schedules to plan your life outside work as well to keep track of your work time, family time, friends time and personal time.
Schedule free time. This one may sound boring because planning your free time sounds like robbing yourself of spontaneity and fun. Do the opposite – plan fun activities even if you didn’t plan any – put dinner dates, date nights, movie visits into your calendar.
Learn to prioritize. Use one of the prioritization techniques to rank-order your tasks and do first the one with the most impact. Get rid of low-impact items and delegate the rest.
Say no. When you know your priorities, you can tell whether incoming activities will contribute to your goals or not. So you need to say no to activities that don’t add value to your life, career or personal wellbeing.
Know your limits. Explore your energy limits and don’t overwork. Don’t take more responsibility than you can handle. Keep track of your people-pleasing tendencies, if there are any, and put your interests first.
Get comfortable with imperfection. If 20% of efforts produce 80% of results, think of how much time, effort and opportunities you rob yourself of due to perfectionism. Review your attitude to take some pressure off, relieve yourself of stress and anxiety that you put yourself into.
Practice single-tasking. Multitasking slows down your progress, makes you prone to making mistakes and stresses you out. To concentrate on one task at a time, start a timer and measure time spent on this assignment only.
Track your time. Pick a time tracking tool that fits you best: timesheet app, desktop time tracker, mobile app, browser extension or even a stopwatch timer.
Estimate your activities. When building a work schedule, set up the start time and end time for individual tasks and events. Use time trackers to define time estimates and compare them with your time spent on them. Use this difference to create your next schedule and plan your next workload more accurately.
Review your performance regularly. Use Google Sheets or time trackers with project management features to record time against tasks, get analytics reports, identify your weak points and be more productive next time.

For more time management advice, continue reading: 20 Most Common Time Management Problems & Solutions

Lifestyle Advice

Burnout happens not only due to work-related reasons but also because we have unbalanced relationships with other people, our bodies and our needs. So this part is devoted to building a set of healthy habits that will contribute to creating a supportive environment where you can recharge your batteries.

Discover and follow your North Star. Review your talents, dreams, activities that excite you and combine them to create your own direction in life. Stick to it outside of work to bring more excitement and fun into your life.
Indulge in other passions. Engage in other activities outside your work: try different sports, cultural events, fishing or gardening, photography – anything you’ve been putting off recently. Doing something unrelated to your “actual” work might reignite your passion and spark new ideas.
Improve your soft skills. Let’s say you have to deal with a toxic colleague at work and feel upset every time after talking to them. Have you ever wondered what you can do to solve this issue? What do they tell about it in the books? It’s time to find out.
Review your needs and habits. Block out at least half an hour to disconnect and contemplate what could make your life even better. Maybe you’d like to socialize and go out more? Or find a sports buddy and go to the gym together? Create small routines around these wishes and see how your life blooms day after day.
Practice mindfulness. What was the last time you spent quality time with your family and kids? Do you remember the last meal that you really enjoyed? If you are new to mindfulness, try being 200% present at random times of day to appreciate a sip of coffee, a smile of your partner, a walk with your dog or any other tiny detail of the day.
Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Introduce some new hobbies, events and routines into your schedule. Go on international trips to experience a new culture and change your environment for a while. This will add a little positive stress into your life that will fill you with new energies, ideas and perspectives.
Fill your days with joy. What was the last time when you were very excited about something? Include small things that make you feel better into your daily schedule – be it dinner in a cafe, a weekend party, a glass of wine at the end of the day – whatever makes you alive and allows you to celebrate life.
Start therapy. It may take a while to find the right therapist who you are comfortable with, but it will be worth the effort. Share your thoughts and doubts to discover fresh ideas and insights about your personal life and career.
OR practice journaling. If you can’t afford or have a skeptical attitude towards therapy, try journaling. Record your emotions and worries, break down your goals into actionable steps, review your values, plan your next day.

Self-Care Advice

Prioritize yourself: replenish your physical and emotional energy, take care of your mental health. Choose some of the following tips, squeeze them into your schedule and make them habits to help your body prevent or recover from burnout. If your schedule is too packed, give yourself time to assess exactly how you spend your time using a free time tracker and remove low-impact activities.

Review your daily activities. For each block of time, record what you’re doing and how you feel on a scale of 1 to 10 and how valuable the activity is. This will help you find opportunities to limit your exposure to tasks, people, and situations that aren’t essential and put you in a negative mood.
Spend quality time. Block time when you can be yourself with people who love and support you to feel loved and more balanced.
Eat high-nutrition foods to keep yourself healthy and energized.
Develop a consistent sleep schedule. Get up at the same time every day, even on weekends or during vacations. Sleep hygiene reduces stress and relieves body tensions.
See your doctor to get a routine checkup. Get the treatment or identify and prevent the illnesses early on.
Establish personal boundaries. If you struggle to say no and feel drained often, discuss your concerns about work and career development.
Stay physically active. You don’t have to purchase a gym membership – start with choosing stairs instead of an elevator or taking 10,000 steps daily.
Try meditation. Meditation is known for decreasing stress levels in your body after only a few weeks of practice.
Spend time in nature. Time in nature calms the nervous system, reduces anxiety and improves mood.
Seek support. Ask your parents or partner to help you with your daily responsibilities.

How to Beat Burnout?

Burnout can be summarized as accumulated stress and frustration originating from poor work-life balance. And one of the most common reasons that trigger it is a feeling of making little or no progress that emerges due to poor time management habits. So, one of the crucial things that can help you and your team keep track of their progress is time tracking.

Consider actiTIME – time tracking software that makes productivity tracking effortless and stress-free. Log time using the web interface, start timers in your browser extension or mobile app and sync the data with your weekly timesheet. Set up deadlines, time estimates, review project progress and productivity trends, automate accounting, including payrolls and client invoices. Explore the whole set of features with a free 30-day trial or request a product demo to get a product tour and find out if it’s a good fit for your needs.

16 Tips on How to Make Remote Meetings More Efficient (+ Apps & Tools)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 10:21:26 +0000

With the outbreak of the global pandemic and the growing popularity of remote work, remote meetings became an essential part of every workflow. Most managers prefer face-to-face meetings and perceive remote ones as less productive. But the good news is that there is always a possibility to adapt and improve the remote collaboration processes and outcomes.

To help you maximize the productivity of remote meetings, we’ve created the following list of tips. Read on to learn how to prepare for remote meetings, how to hold them effectively and what you can do to make sure that you and your team members will make the most of it.

Before the Meeting

Pick Meeting Tools
Sharpen the Meeting Agenda
Set Time Properly
Develop and Share the Rules
Plan Ice-Breakers
Communicate the Meeting Context

During the Meeting

Set the Mood
Introduce Everyone
Remind of the Meeting Goal
Split the Roles Between Attendants
Be Engaging
Use Interactive Tools
Ask Participants to Contribute

After the Meeting

Clarify Takeaways
Send Follow-ups
Ask for Feedback

Remote Work is Here to Stay

Before the Meeting

1. Pick Meeting Tools

Any remote meeting is based on three pillars: connection, collaboration and feedback. Here are our top suggestions for each category:

Connection tools: Zoom, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Discord
Collaboration tools: Slack, Google Slides, Google Jamboard, Trello, Coggle
Feedback tools: Google Forms, SurveyMonkey

With these essentials, you can be sure that participants will feel more engaged. Don’t forget to notify them about your choice of tools beforehand. Otherwise, you’ll have to waste some meeting time to set your meeting environment.

2. Sharpen the Meeting Agenda

Meetings take the time and effort of all the participants, so the best way you can save these resources is to prepare the meeting agenda in advance. Create a detailed plan of all the items you plan to cover and make sure that this order of items is the most digestible one for your listeners.

To make the most of the meeting, you may want to use questions instead of items for discussion in your meeting plan. Questions will allow you to get a better understanding of who should be invited to the meeting, what problems should be solved instead of abstract topics covered. When you cover all the questions from your agenda, you may be sure that you’ve reached the goal of the meeting.

For maximum meeting productivity, share your agenda with the participants in advance so that they could prepare their questions and ideas.

Our top picks of idea visualization tools: Google Slides, MindMeister, Coggle

3. Set Time Properly

When scheduling the meeting time, you need to decide whose priorities come first. For example, if you intend to include team members related to the client service, you’ll want to prioritize their needs and adjust meeting time to their schedules because clients always come first. Or if your team is scattered across the globe and different time zones, you need to consider their local time or schedule different meetings for participants from different parts of the world.

Think about the duration of the meeting and don’t hesitate to schedule strict time limits. Check with your meeting agenda and make sure that you’ll have enough time to cover all the items and hold a discussion. At the same time, a shorter meeting length creates positive pressure and makes you focus on the most important ideas.

For more productivity, notify your team about the start time of the meeting and its approximate duration so that all participants could schedule their time properly.

4. Develop and Share the Rules

Regardless of the type of meeting, you need to develop the scenario to make it organized and productive. Are you going to ask introductory questions or go ahead with your speech first? Can participants ask questions as they arise or wait until you finish with the presentation? In which cases attendants should use voice and text chats? All these questions should be carefully thought through and communicated to the participants.

Our top picks of chat tools: Slack, Fleep, Twist, Discord

5. Plan Ice-Breakers

Remote work creates not only physical but also emotional distance between employees. When you gather a remote meeting and see familiar faces joining the video call, you can’t expect them to be initiative right away after they’ve spent most of their day at home in a comfy atmosphere. So, if you hold remote meetings, it’s your responsibility to break the ice and make your team members engage in the conversation.

When it comes to ideas of ice-breaking activities, your imagination and your corporate culture are the only restrictions. You can find dozens of ideas on the Internet, but below, we list our favorites to inspire you.

Coffee time. Gather together in a video chat room and have tea or coffee together, just like during the office coffee breaks. Feel free to discuss the weather, hobbies, plans for weekends — anything that is not related to work.
Trivia quiz. Create a quiz about any topic, share your screen, host the quiz and let your meeting participants discuss the answer options and submit the winning choice. Trivia quizzes can either be related to work (e.g., fact quiz that introduces participants to the topic of the meeting) or not related (e.g., team trivia quiz where participants should answer fun questions about their colleagues).
Team photo. Take a funny team photo on the video chat platform. Allow the meeting participants to choose a funny video background photo, put on weird hats and clothes or decide which funny face to make. Give them a few minutes to get ready and snap.

Plan icebreakers and team-building activities before the start of the meeting and include them in your meeting plan.

Our top picks of virtual icebreakers: Bored, IceBreakers

6. Communicate the Meeting Context

Most remote meetings require introducing the participants to the details such as the topic of the meeting, its duration, what kind of participants’ interaction is expected. To do this, you may want to send pre-meeting emails or send a message to the meeting chat in Slack.

Regular meetings, e.g., standup meetings, usually don’t require any introductions, but brainstorms could go either way.

During the Meeting

7. Set the Mood

Mood has a significant impact on how we feel and behave, especially in the working environment. As the meeting host, it’s important that you set the right meeting tone for the remote meeting. Start the meeting with energy and set a positive mood to encourage creativity and productivity.

Introduce the planned ice-breaking activity at the onset of the meeting to create a positive atmosphere at the meeting. Hold a brainstorming session, create a trivia quiz or something fun to lighten the mood and encourage participants to engage. Keep this spirit alive through the whole meeting.

8. Introduce Everyone

Not everyone turns their cameras on during the remote video meetings and a long list of participants may not display all the users present at the meeting. In any case, it is a good practice to introduce speakers and attendants of the meeting. You may also want to invite your participants to introduce themselves, if necessary.

9. Remind of the Meeting Goal

Introduce or remind the participants of the meeting goal and objectives. Use visual aids such as presentations, collaboration whiteboards and mind maps to make your introduction more engaging.

After you introduce the agenda, it’s the best time to share the meeting rules and plan. Explain to the participants the meeting scenario, the order of topics and speakers, the rules on when they can ask the questions. For example, suppose you are planning to hold a brainstorming session. In that case, you may want to notify the participants about that in advance to avoid unnecessary interruptions during the course of the meeting.

Our top picks of task management apps: Trello, Todoist, Asana

10. Split the Roles Between Attendants

To hold an effective remote meeting, you need to keep track of many things, which makes it almost impossible to handle everything on your own. Pick a few attendants and assign special roles to them to help you hold the meeting.

Here are a few role ideas:

Facilitator — responsible for guiding the attendants towards reaching the meeting goal by setting the meeting pace, asking open questions to start discussions, leading decisions and capturing action points.
Notetaker — records key ideas, decisions, results. These notes are usually sent out in the follow-up letters after the meeting.
Timekeeper — makes sure that every agenda item receives enough time and attention. For example, they limit time spent on each topic and notify the attendants about time running out.

In case of recurring meetings, assign these roles to different people or run a lottery so that nobody knows which role they’ll get the next time. This will improve the engagement of the meeting attendants.

Our top picks of note-taking apps: Evernote, OneNote, Google Drive & Docs, Notion

Our top picks of time tracking apps: actiTIME

11. Be Engaging

Speaking of engagement, no one likes boring meetings. We’ve already mentioned ice breakers that set the tone of the meeting. To keep the attendants’ attention, we advise the following ideas:

Set expectations for the participants’ engagement
Run short team-building activities
Take time to celebrate achievements
Use quizzes to introduce attendants to the meeting agenda
Encourage the use of the text chat
Use online whiteboards to create flow charts and other visuals
Run opinion polls
Allow attendants to submit anonymous questions

To understand the importance of this advice, think of college professors whose lectures are monotonous and tedious — their main mistake is that they prioritize information and facts over the audience. One of the key elements of any performance is to be mindful of your audience and encourage their participation.

12. Use Interactive Tools

To encourage employee engagement and make the most of remote meetings, you can implement various online tools for surveying, brainstorming and visualizing. Here are some of our top picks.

Polls and quizzes: Google Forms, Mentimeter, Poll Everywhere
Whiteboards: Miro, Aww, Microsoft Whiteboard
Mind maps: Coggle, MindMeister

Interactive apps will allow even the shyest employees to involve and participate in meeting activities. Whiteboards and mind maps will help the participants to come up with new ideas and grasp new concepts with more ease. At the same time, polls and quizzes will break the ice and help you to collect feedback.

13. Ask Participants to Contribute

Remind participants of their responsibility to contribute to the meeting. The best way to do it is to ask attendees of their perspectives on the meeting agenda regardless of their position, e.g., ask your online marketers and customer support agents to share their thoughts on the product development. Or try the “nowhere to hide” rule: assign people to groups, define the problem they need to solve and give them a limited timeframe to come up with the solution.

Here are a few more ideas of how to get people to participate in remote meetings:

Take polls. Incorporate polls and surveys throughout the event. Take anonymous polls if it’s a sensitive topic.
Ask open questions. As a meeting host, be genuinely interested in collecting as many opinions as possible. Ask questions that require creativity, imagination or analysis e.g., ask employees from other departments to review a new product feature and share their opinion.
Get them to collaborate. Use online whiteboards for brainstorming sessions or encourage collective note-taking using Google Docs.
Take breaks. After you introduce the agenda and finish your presentation, take a break to allow participants to digest and reflect on the information.

Remember that during remote meetings, participants can only hear one person at a time clearly, so establish the rules on how to take turns and mute those who ignore them.

After the Meeting

14. Clarify Takeaways

Before the meeting is over, refresh the key takeaways to keep in mind. Summarize the most important ideas, next steps or individual tasks and responsibilities that have been identified and assigned during the meeting. Here are a few ideas for the perfect takeaway part:

Highlight key ideas
Ask for questions
List action items
Set deadlines

This closing stage of the meeting is essential to the meeting’s success because it helps the participants remember and write them down if they haven’t done that yet.

15. Send Follow-ups

To make sure that all the participants can get back to the meeting takeaways anytime and people responsible for taking the next steps won’t forget about that, you need to send follow-ups to all the participants. Pick the distribution channel that will ensure that the follow-ups will reach as many people as possible e.g., for this reason, you may prefer to use a Slack channel over emails.

Another best practice of engaging follow-ups is to add a touch of creativity and humor. Include gifs and funny pics, add funny quotes and ideas from the meeting, give thanks to the most participating attendants, celebrate the brightest ideas and make it a habit. Make the meeting participants wait for your next follow-up message each time after the meeting.

16. Ask for Feedback

Finally, one of the essential tips for meeting hosts is to ask for feedback and learn from it. Prepare quick online surveys where meeting participants can anonymously share their opinions and offer ideas for improvement. Use this feedback to reflect, learn and introduce new tools and approaches during your next meeting.

To keep post-meeting messages and notifications to the minimum, include the link to the feedback-gathering form in the follow-up email or message.

Our top picks of quiz apps: Google Forms, Mentimeter, Poll Everywhere

Remote Work is Here to Stay

The global shift to remote work has proved many benefits for employers and employees. Companies are planning to cut their commercial space and allow most of their employees to work from home 2–4 days per week with only a few days in the office if needed. So, remote meetings and online tools became an essential part of every workflow.

Best Upcoming Online Conferences for Developers (Most of Them Free)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 16:33:48 +0000

*header pic by Shen Comix

Technology is the fastest-growing industry nowadays, which requires developers to keep up with the updates. What makes the 2nd half of 2021 an especially attractive time for attending conferences is that in the post-COVID times, most organizers host events online for free!

To help you find the best deals, we’ve compiled the following list of upcoming online conferences for developers that will take place from June to December 2021. Please note that the list is not comprehensive because most of the Q4 events will be announced later.

June 2021

Low-Code Marathon

Date: June 1-14, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: Low-Code Tech, No-Code Tech

Low-Code Marathon is a 10-day event for IT and business leaders on building successful low-code and no-code products. The marathon will be hosted online starting June 1st, 2021, and will introduce the attendants into the low-code tech, showcase successful businesses in different industries, share tips and tricks of building a successful low-code product and highlight the trends.

UX Fest 2021

Date: June 1-3, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: £450 (+ £100 for Tuesday Masterclasses)
Topics: Interaction Design, Product Design

UX Fest 2021 is a three-day event devoted to all things UX that will start June 1st. It will hold talks about interaction design, product design, UX writing, multi-variant testing and growth design. You’ll be able to join short talks, live Q&As, and panel discussions.

You can also purchase a pass to Tuesday masterclasses that will run on June 8, 15 & 22. Industry leaders will share their skills in design research, writing, building strong design teams and more. This pass will cost you £100 +VAT. Check out the masterclass schedule.

Every Thursday in June, they will also hold festivals that will celebrate design, the culture around it and the future of the profession. Speakers will mostly cover design strategy, culture and ethics, as well as other topics. Check out the festival schedule.

Online Angular Global Summit

Date: June 1-2, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free for Junior Track – entry-level talks;
$299 for Junior and Senior talks, recordings included
Topics: Angular

Online Angular Global Summit is a three-day event that will take place online starting June 1st. Leading engineers from Microsoft, Google, Upwork, Samsung, JetBrains will share their expertise about the new Angular 11 version. You’ll learn about unit testing, accessibility issues, Angular tools, effective designer and developer collaboration, application optimization and more. You can also purchase tickets with one of the workshops – prices start at $299.

F8 Refresh by Facebook

Date: June 2, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: Facebook tech: Instagram, Messenger, Spark AR, Facebook Cloud Gaming Platform

F8 Refresh is a free online event for developers who can sign up on the Facebook for Developers page. The speakers will showcase the latest Facebook apps and tech, including augmented reality, business messaging, business tools, Facebook Login and gaming. Check out the event schedule.

UXcamp Europe 2021

Date: June 5-6, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: UX Design

UXcamp Europe 2021 is a free online event that used to be held offline and quickly sold out during the pre-COVID times. On June, 5 they will announce the schedule and share the links to individual session boards. Overall, about 10 sessions are expected, discussions and networking including.

WWDC21 – Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

Date: June 7-11, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: Apple products: iOS 15, iPadOS 15, WatchOS 8, MacOS 12, and TVOS 15

WWCD is Apple’s largest event for developers that will take place entirely online. Apple will preview iOS 15, iPadOS 15, WatchOS 8, MacOS 12, and TVOS 15 and talk about the future of their products. There are rumors about new iPhones, iPads, Macs and AirPods, Apple transitioning from Intel processors to its own chips for its Mac computers and working on a new range of products, including self-driving cars, VR and AR tech. Which of these rumors will prove true – we’ll learn at WWDC21.

Data & AI 2021 by IBM

Date: June 8, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: Machine Learning, DataOps, ModelOps, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Data & AI 2021 is a free AI-centred event held by IBM. You’ll participate in talks and discussions dedicated to machine learning, DataOps, ModelOps, deep learning, natural language processing and more. You’ll get an insight into open source technologies and career experiences to plan your next career move.

During the conference, you can also join a 24-hour livestream party to hang out with the speakers and ask questions.

Check out the event schedule.

React Day Norway Online

Date: June 9, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free (+ Swag tickets with merch)
Topics: JavaScript, React, NextJS, Gatsby

React Day Norway Online is a free full-day conference with internationally renowned speakers discussing React, React Native, and GraphQL.

Speakers include professionals from IBM, Mailchimp, Tinder, Auth0, Cognite and more.

Future Developer Summit 2021: DevRel, The Next Day

Date: June 9, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: DevRel, Developer Marketing, Relations & Experience

The second episode of Future Developer Summit will be held on June, 9 and will introduce ways of how developers can skyrocket business performance, followed by a networking session and a master class about effective developer communication channels.

UXDX USA 2021

Date: June 16-17, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Various packages available, starting at $49 per person
Topics: Product Design, Product Development, UX

UXDX is one of the fastest-growing product development conferences that will host a two-day event discussing the latest trends in User Experience (UX) and Developer Experience (DX). It will deliver inspiring case studies, panel discussions with like-minded experts, and workshops. The ultimate goal of the conference is to discuss team effectiveness and performance among product owners, designers, UX, developer and QA teams.

Dublin Tech Summit

Date: June 17, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Starting at $29
Topics: The Internet of Things, Big Data, FinTech, Innovation, MusicXTech, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Cyber Security

Dublin Tech Summit is a one-day event that combines technology, innovation and business to produce insight into the future of trends and technologies. Experts from over 70 countries will come together to share knowledge, debate the latest trends, and network.

Check out the event schedule.

ADDC – App Design & Development Conference

Date: June 23-24, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: $299
Topics: App Design, App Development, UX Design, UI Design

ADDC is an opportunity for designers and app developers to share expertise, work together and get inspired in the space of like-minded individuals. Speakers include product designers, UX designers, engineers and developers from Strava, Sharp3D, N26, Touchlab, Wallapop and more.

WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2021

Date: June 28 – July 1st, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Start at $99
Topics: App Design, App Development, UX Design, UI Design

WeAreDevelopers World Congress is one of the largest annual events for developers, engineers, software architects and tech decision-makers. Global industry leaders will share their professional insights on the current and future trends, hold workshops and networking sessions.

Watch the 2019 talks to get familiar with the event.

July 2021

jsday 2021

Date: July 6-7, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Starting at €39.82
Topics: JavaScript, NodeJS, Vue.js, React

jsday is a conference dedicated solely to JavaScript and its ecosystem. This 2021 edition is taking place online and will last 2 days (July, 6 and 7). Since its first edition, it has attracted speakers and visitors from Google, Mozilla, Facebook, Opera and more.

During this virtual conference, you’ll be able to watch live streams, ask questions to speakers, connect and network with other attendants.

Watch the past talks.

SciPy Conference 2021

Date: July 12-18, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Start at $99
Topics: Python

SciPy 2021 is an annual Python-related conference where industry leaders will showcase their projects and share their expertise. The full event program will include 2 days of tutorials (July 12-13), 3 days of talks (July 14-16) and 2 days of developer sprints (July 17-18).

Check out the event schedule.

August 2021

Open Source Summit North America

Date: September 27 – 30, 2021
Location: Online or in Seattle, Washington, US
Cost: TBA
Topics: open source solutions

Open Source Summit is an opportunity for open source developers and tech enthusiasts to collaborate and learn about the latest technologies and innovations across open source. Summit speakers will include developers, sysadmins, DevOps professionals and IT architects discussing cloud-native, edge computing, AI and more. The event is hosted by the Linux Foundation as a four-day event, the ticket cost is to be announced.

Check out the event schedule.

September 2021

London Tech Week

Date: September 20-24, 2021
Location: Online or in London
Cost: TBA
Topics: Digital Transformation, AI, 5G, Investments

London Tech Week will host a 5-day event that will connect innovators and entrepreneurs and include round tables, activations and networking moments. The event will offer upskilling opportunities, discussions and innovative solutions across various industries. London Tech Week also prepared awards nominations that will be disclosed later.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021

Date: September 21-23, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Start at $49
Topics: Startups, Emerging Tech, Fundraising

TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day online event that will focus on founder-investor relationships and share insights to successful communication and funding. Startup leaders will share their experiences and gather to answer questions and connect.

You can choose from multiple passes starting at $49. Review the passes and their special privileges.

SpiceWorld Virtual

Date: September 27-29, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Free
Topics: Security, Cloud, Virtualization, Automation, Software

SpiceWorld is bringing together thousands of IT professionals and hundreds of tech brands for this 3-day event. You will hear talks about tech innovations and the latest IT solutions and will have an opportunity to network with peers. The agenda is yet to be updated, but you can already register for the event for free.

International JavaScript Conference

Date: September 27-30, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Start at $611
Topics: Angular, JavaScript, Node.js, Progressive Web Apps, React

The International JavaScript Conference will take place on September 27-30 and will cover insights on the present and future JavaScript. These four days of the conference will be filled with keynotes, talks, live coding sessions, networking and workshops.

TNW (The Next Web)

Date: September 30 – October 1st, 2021
Location: Online and in Amsterdam
Cost: Starts at € 100
Topics: Startups, Emerging Tech, Fundraising

TNW Conference is a 2-day conference that will bring together tech executives, top-tier investors, scale-ups and start-ups for business and knowledge sharing. You can expect valuable keynote content, interactive sessions with audience engagement, and plenty of opportunities to connect and do business with people attending in-person and online.

October 2021

DotNetOS Conference

Date: October 4-6, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Starts at $595
Topics: .NET 5, .NET Core and .NET

The DotNetOS Conference is a free online three-day conference where top speakers from large-scale companies like Microsoft and Amazon will share their knowledge of the .NET 5, .NET Core and .NET performance. Every day you’ll meet three new speakers that will give 1-hour talks each.

The event agenda has already been established:

UXDX EMEA 2021

Date: October 6-8, 2021
Location: Online and Dublin
Cost: Various packages available, starting at €49 per person
Topics: Product Development, UX Design

UXDX EMEA 2021 will focus on product design, product development and UX design during a 3-day event. The conference will deliver live and on-demand content through case study talks, panels and workshops from global leaders.

Check out the event agenda.

Google Cloud Next’21

Date: October 12-14, 2021
Location: TBD
Cost: TBD
Topics: Google Cloud

Google Cloud Next’21 will deliver insights into how companies have transformed their businesses with Google Cloud. The event agenda or any other details remain undisclosed, but you can explore content from Next OnAir ’20 and subscribe to the event updates.

API World

Date: October 26-28, 2021
Location: Online
Cost: Starting at $595
Topics: API, microservices

API World is an all-virtual event for technical leaders, engineers, software architects, and executives that will focus on API & microservices tech. The event’s overview is already available on the conference website, though the details of the event agenda are still to be announced.

Along with the conference and workshops, you can take part in an online hackathon (October 18–28) and expo (October 27–28).

Ready to Level Up Your Developer Career?

Conferences is not the only way to upgrade your skills and knowledge and become a better professional. For example, you should also learn from other developers’ mistakes, improve your developer portfolio and handle time management problems effectively.

actiTIME is a simple time tracking tool that you can use to keep track of your time and identify productivity patterns. It integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Jira and other software and is accessible through online software, browser extension and mobile app – just pick a task, hit the “Start” button and don’t lose a single minute.

How to Build a Great Developer Portfolio (+ Examples & Tools)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ — Wed, 26 May 2021 12:36:52 +0000

*header pic by Shen Comix

As any other specialists, developers need to market themselves to get dream jobs and projects, attract more clients and reach a desirable level of income. The necessary skills and a killer portfolio website are the two things that you need. Many developers think of portfolios as an optional objective, passing the competitive advantage to those who think otherwise, and here’s why.

A developer portfolio is a website that showcases your best work, personality and talents. It is your best chance to prove your skills, share your enthusiasm about the profession and give your potential employers and clients a glimpse of how awesome it would be to work with you. LinkedIn pages and résumés are also important, but they focus on work experience and don’t communicate your true value. Résumé is where you talk the talk, and portfolio is where you walk the walk.

This article will dwell on the most important components of developer portfolios and illustrate them with real-life examples. You can also use this article as a checklist and save it to get back to it anytime.

Before You Build a Portfolio
1. Keep the Target Audience in Mind

Take Advantage of Your Homepage
Make Your Portfolio Scannable
Minimize Clicks

2. Remember UX and UI

Go Mobile or Go Home
Optimize Website Performance
Remember Accessibility

3. Showcase Your Best Work and Skills

Share Your Code and Live Projects
OR Provide Code Samples and GIFs
Boast Freelance and Personal Projects
BUT Be Selective
Prove that You Are on The Same Page

4. Show Your Personality

Use Custom Domain
Make Use of Introductory Statement
Use Your Tone of Voice
Share Your Motivation (Optional)

5. Maintain Personal Brand

Keep Portfolio Up-to-Date
Include Testimonials

6. Encourage Communication
How to Build a Great Developer Portfolio

Before You Build a Portfolio

When building a portfolio, developers often forget about its purpose and create websites that don’t meet the expectations and hardly attract any clients or job offers. Let’s take a look into developer portfolios from a marketing perspective.

Essential questions to ask yourself before building a portfolio:

Who is your target audience? Do you create a portfolio as an extension of your CV or as an independent website where you market your skills, sell your services and attract clients? These are two completely different use cases meaning different approaches to building a portfolio.
What are they looking for? For example, there’s a high chance that employers will want to have a look at your code while your clients won’t care about it – now you can deduce the website structure and content with more ease.
How will they use your portfolio website? Employers will most likely be interested to see your projects and code, while clients may take more interest in your professional services, case studies and personality.
What are their pain points? For example, employers need to make sure that you are a team player who meets deadlines and delivers quality – include quotes from your recommendation letters to solve these doubts. Or use client logos and case studies to prove to your potential clients that you are trustworthy and reliable.
Why you? Why should they choose you and not another developer or a whole agency instead? How are you different from others? What are the benefits of working with you?

After you answer these questions, you’ll better understand what is expected of you and how to build a portfolio that will deliver the desired results. Along with that, you’ll know how to communicate your personality and which soft skills to highlight. So, keep your ideal client or employer in mind when building your developer portfolio.

1. Keep the Target Audience in Mind

A portfolio website may look like a perfect opportunity to showcase your skills, but you’d better keep it simple. Just think of it: your potential employer or client opens your portfolio and fails to work their way through all the bells and whistles – you definitely don’t want that to happen. So our first advice is to keep your portfolio website clean and uncluttered.

The main goal of a developer portfolio is to impress its visitors with your projects, code, personality, UX and UI sensibilities. Therefore, a junior developer portfolio should contain a smooth and straightforward user interface with simple navigation. If it’s your first portfolio, we’d recommend using HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript.

Helpful tools: Behance, Dribble, Figma, Adobe XD, GitHub Pages

Take Advantage of Your Homepage

Your portfolio homepage is your only chance to make a positive first impression. It needs to make clear who you are and what you do, contain your photo or image and have a hint of your personality in the intro text.

_[Seb Kay](https://sebkay.com/) introduced himself at the portfolio homepage_

Make Your Portfolio Scannable

The spread of the Internet has changed the way we interact with web pages: we no longer read them from top-to-bottom but scan. So make sure that your layout is perfectly styled, your texts are written in plain language and are proofread, all links and interactable objects are up and running.

Minimize Clicks

Portfolios don’t have to be complex – they should contain the most critical information for your visitors. Your projects, code samples, social media and contact form should be only a few clicks away.

2. Remember UX and UI

As a developer, you should be aware of the UX and UI fundamentals. Your portfolio website should have a simple good looking UI and provide a good UX as well.

If you are not good with design, you may want to gather inspiration from design platforms such as Behance and Dribble. After that, you can design the website, its navigation and structure using Figma or Adobe XD and then code it.

_[Suresh Murali](https://sureshmurali.github.io/) created a design that you can feel_

Don’t forget to develop design and the positioning of the UI components, including icons, form elements, checkboxes, text and search fields, tooltips and menus. Learn best typography tips before you finish your mockup and start coding: fonts set the mood for your design and, when applied incorrectly, can bust your mobile version website.

Go Mobile or Go Home

Speaking of mobile, this is the mobile age and it’s your number one priority to develop a mobile-responsive website. Responsive design aims to avoid the necessary resizing, scrolling, zooming and provide a pleasant experience. If your portfolio website isn’t mobile-friendly, that’s a huge drawback that will most likely turn off your potential employers and clients.

_[Prashant Sani](https://prashantsani.com/) created a mobile-friendly portfolio_

Optimize Website Performance

Website performance is another key element of a successful developer portfolio. Users are unlikely to wait for more than 3 seconds for your website to load. So, optimize the size of the images, set up lazy-loading, minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files and use website caching.

To learn how your website is doing in terms of performance, accessibility, SEO and other parameters try Lighthouse – a Google Chrome extension that gives you a full website audit.

Comprehensive List of Chrome Extensions for Developers 🔥

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ May 16 '21

#productivity #career #100daysofcode #webdev

Helpful tools: tinyjpg, tinypng

Remember Accessibility

Accessibility is another critical quality criterion of any website. It includes website adjustments for people with special needs, disabilities and impairments that can make it difficult for them to navigate your website.

Here are a few ideas on how to improve website accessibility:

add alt text to all images
choose accessible color choices
enable resizable text
create accessible forms
turn off auto-play for flashing and blinking elements like ads and videos
provide transcripts for audio and video elements

_[Lounge Lizard](https://www.loungelizard.com/) takes accessibility seriously_

Helpful tools: Contrast Checker, Accessibility Developer Tools, Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

3. Showcase Your Best Work and Skills

Share Your Code and Live Products

Now, this is a major distinction between résumé and portfolio: while résumé lists your education and employment history, portfolio is where you showcase your work and achievements, communicate your skills and personality.

When it comes to showing your work, you can either show the end-products, provide links to code or do both – which approach is best depends on your portfolio’s purpose. If your portfolio is meant to serve as an extension of your résumé, you may want to include both code and end-product links, while in the case of the client portfolio, you need to showcase your work only.

_[Alex Calia](https://alexcalia.com/) shows live products and links to their GitHub repos_

As long as the project gallery is the key part of your portfolio, it would be best to put it right after the home section. Pick projects that you built yourself or, in the case of junior developers, don’t include projects from tutorials unless you customized and made them unique. Another good practice is to supply projects with descriptions and the tech stack used.

_[Rafael Caferati](https://caferati.me/) uses tags for project navigation_

If you have a lot of projects and technologies used, consider building navigation for them. If you can boast a wide variety of projects, define the context for which those projects were developed. For example, “a commercial website for a marketing agency” or “a language exchange platform for up to 100k users”.

OR Provide Code Samples and GIFs

If you’ve been working on a private project or developed particular parts of a project, include code samples if allowed by the associated client or employee. Here are a few ideas of how to do it:

Embed or add links to code editors with live previews
Add links to GitHub repos and supply them with animated GIFs
Upload a screencast video to explain your process and how you worked

Check out your source code and make sure that it is properly organized: it follows folder structure and naming conventions. This will prove that your thinking is structured and organized and will make it easier for employers and clients to follow your project.

Boast Freelance & Personal Projects

Freelance projects also make a great addition to your portfolio as they demonstrate your credibility, communication and time management skills, which constitute a good freelancer and full-time employee alike. Freelance jobs also provide an opportunity to try new technology, so you may showcase these projects to highlight more skills.

Sometimes, you may want to list some skills that are missing in-practice confirmation. If you struggle to find freelance projects for that, you can always start a project of your own that you’ll showcase in the portfolio. For example, you may want to create your own version of a landing page for the company that you want to impress. This will also demonstrate your motivation, a self-starter attitude and passion for the profession.

_[Matt Farley](https://mattfarley.ca/) shares his startup projects_

BUT Be Selective

You must be proud of your work and showcase as many projects as possible. But remember that your potential employers and clients won’t be delving into details of your every project. Most likely, they will spend a minute or two reviewing your website and will take a bit closer look at some of your projects.

To learn which projects to include in the portfolio, ask yourself the following questions:

What makes you incredibly proud of this project?
Does it prove your skills, knowledge and talents that are missing in other projects?
Are there similar projects in your portfolio? If yes, are you willing to replace them with this project?

If you know someone who is reliable, trustworthy and more experienced than you, ask for their feedback and use it to include the best work in your portfolio.

Prove that You Are on The Same Page

If you build a portfolio to attract clients, it’s important to show that you speak the same language. Your clients are unlikely to use devspeak, which makes your ability to clearly articulate your code in plain terms a great soft skill. The same is true for full-time employment: you need to communicate clearly with non-programmers, including designers and other team members.

4. Show Your Personality

A portfolio not only gives you a perfect opportunity to showcase your work and achievements but it is also a great means to express yourself. Your potential employers and clients want to know you better to understand if you are going to click.

Don’t hesitate to use the About Me part and tell about your passion for video games, pixel art or whatever drives you. Mention your background and education if you think they will communicate important details about you. Add a hint of your personality in the body of your website, its design and navigation – it’s your portfolio, after all. And, of course, don’t forget to upload a headshot or an image of yourself.

Use Custom Domain

Your developer portfolio is a part of your brand as is your website address. To look professional, you need a suitable URL. Usually, a portfolio address includes the name of its owner or the work they do. Instead of hosting your website on a long-tailed subdomain, consider buying your own.

_[Brittany Chiang](https://brittanychiang.com/) hosts her portfolio on a personal domain containing her full name_

Many developers forget to buy an SSL certificate for their website that moves it from HTTP to HTTPS, making it more secure and trustworthy for browsers and search engines. Imagine that you send a link to your portfolio to your client, but their browser blocks the page because your website is not secure (e.g. Google Chrome is guilty of this) – you don’t want that to happen.

Make Use of Introductory Statement

One more place to express your personality is the intro paragraph on your homepage, where you may introduce yourself. Some developers use it to list their tech stack, while others include other relevant experience and related professions.

_[Josue Espinosa](https://ejosue.com/) makes use of his intro statement_

Use Your Tone of Voice

Tone of voice in written communication is your choice of words, their order and rhythm, which makes it a great means for expressing your personality. A pile of facts and statements has the same impact on the reader as a fridge manual – none at all. But if you use some expressive or colloquial words, geek-talks or puns, you’ll sound much more human and have greater chances to connect with employers and clients.

Share Your Motivation (Optional)

This advice will bring the most benefit to bootcamp graduates and junior developers. To increase your chances of getting a job, you can prove your motivation and passion for the profession in your portfolio. Showcasing personal projects is one of the most solid ways to prove yourself reliable and motivated. A few lines describing your inner motivation is also an excellent way to highlight your ready-for-hard-work mindset.

Here are a few ideas of what to include in the portfolio:

Mention your achievements and career plans for the next few years
Share your career goals (technology to learn, projects to build) and highlight your passion for studying (attended industry events and conferences)
What you did, do and going to do to meet your career goals

This information works best in résumés but can help you get a job if you don’t have an impressive portfolio yet. Include this information right after the project gallery – this way, you’ll handle potential objections concerning your work experience.

5. Maintain Personal Brand

Personal branding or personal marketing is building your online reputation and making yourself recognizable on the market. Along with your social media accounts, blogs and communities, your portfolio provides a summary of your work experience, skills, talents and personality, so that your online presence communicates a clear and memorable picture of you as a professional.

Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room – Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon

Keep Portfolio Up-To-Date

If you review popular developer portfolios, you’ll notice that most of them haven’t been updated for years: most of the links are broken, social media accounts are inactive, no recent projects or work experience mentioned. Now think of how many new clients these portfolios could bring: while blogs and online media share them as examples of great portfolios, these developers are missing dozens of chances to get star clients and one-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

_[Shawn Wang](https://www.swyx.io/) shares his industry achievements and updates his portfolio website regularly_

So, our advice is to keep your portfolio as up-to-date as possible even when you have enough workload and are not looking for employment or freelance jobs. Update it whenever you finish another project, give a tech talk, start a tech podcast – whatever drives you and, at the same time, is relevant to your portfolio.

Include Testimonials

Let’s recap: a portfolio is a proof of your skills and achievements, an essential part of your personal brand and a marketing tool that attracts employers and customers. To make your portfolio even more convincing, you need to include testimonials.

Here a few ideas:

Include quotes from recommendation letters
Ask for and add feedback from the current place of work
Display feedback from your past clients
If you work as a freelancer, post a few case studies

_[Seb Kay](https://sebkay.com/) – included a quote from his recommendation_

Case studies is a way to add testimonials to your developer portfolio. Case studies are stories about how your clients overcame their problems using your expertise. For each project you include, consider explaining the following:

Client: who they are and what they were looking for
Problem: what problem they solved with you
Project details: timeline, tech stack used, etc.
Your work: what you implemented and why
Results: how your work influenced the client

The contents of the case studies depends on the purpose of your portfolio. If you are looking to get employed, you may want to include more technical details. Or, if you want to attract more clients, keep these details to the minimum and focus on the business benefits instead.

_[Riccardo Zanutta](http://riccardozanutta.com/) takes the case studies approach_

Testimonials make a great addition to any developer portfolio. Encourage your employers and clients to compose a few paragraphs about how your work positively impacted their business. Get their contact information if possible and include it in your résumé and portfolio to add more value to their claims and allow your portfolio visitors to get in touch with them for some follow-up questions

6. Encourage Communication

After you’ve showed your experience, personality and projects, it’s time to ask your portfolio visitors to contact you if they are interested in cooperating with you. The “Contacts” part should be the last and the final point of your developer portfolio.

A few ideas of what goes on the “Contact” page:

Contact form. Please note that recruiters want to contact you now and not to fill out a form and wait to see when, if ever, they get a call back.
Email address. Basically, it’s the same as the contact form + more efforts to open an email tab.
Phone number. Probably the best contact option for recruiters and the worst for communicating with clients.
Hours of availability. Especially useful if you ask your portfolio visitors to contact you via your phone number.
Social media links. Include only active accounts such as LinkedIn, GitHub and StackOverflow to strengthen your credentials.

How to Build a Great Developer Portfolio

A well-rounded developer portfolio is your chance to advance faster in your career and build a personal brand. If you are looking to get a Junior position, a portfolio can make all the difference when you’re competing with other hopefuls for a coveted role. But don’t confuse résumé with portfolio: résumé is where you talk the talk, a portfolio is where you walk the walk.

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Software Devs, What Tools You Can't Do Without?

32 Effective Ways to Increase Productivity at Work (+ Tools)

Table Of Contents

Manage Your Attention

1. Plan your day

2. Control your environment

Background Music for Coding for Every Taste🎶

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Apr 20 '21

3. Check with your goals

20 Productivity Tips From Developers to Developers

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Mar 13 '22

Enhance Concentration

4. Start a timer

5. Quit using pomodoros

How to Help Developers Work in The Flow

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Jun 30 '21

6. Try the Flowtime technique instead

7. Limit social media consumption

8. Develop mental strength

9. Take better care of your health

10. Unload your mind

11. Try meditation

12. Consult with doctor

How to Prevent or Recover from Developer Burnout

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Jun 20 '21

Improve Work Performance

13. Automate routines

14. Improve routine tasks

15. Use peak productivity time

16. Ask for feedback

17. Learn to handle criticism

Master Time Management

18. Track time

19. Estimate activities

Master These Three Skills to Improve Time Management 🚀

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Feb 4 '21

20. Set deadlines

21. Reflect on your performance regularly

20 Most Common Time Management Problems & Solutions ⚡

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ Feb 10 '21

Improve Work Prioritization

22. Use the Ivy Lee method

23. Apply the Pareto principle

24. Implement the ABCDE approach

Overcome Procrastination & Burnout

25. Break down big projects

26. Get comfortable with imperfection

27. Review your progress regularly

Manage Stress

28. Identify your stressors

29. Develop healthy responses

30. Set boundaries

Build Hard Skills

31. Hone your professional skills

How to Build a Great Developer Portfolio (+ Examples & Tools)

Anastasia 🏄🏻‍♀️ for actiTIME Inc ・ May 26 '21

32. Know your tools

Ready to Increase Productivity at Work?

20 Productivity Tips From Developers to Developers

1. Know Your Integrated Development Environment

2. Learn Command Line Interface

3. Never Rush To Code

4. Avoid The Golden Hammer

5. Review Your Commits

6. But Practice Focused Learning

7. Build Side Projects

8. Write Readable Code