Metrics and Information over Emotions — How can data support your decisions

Dominik Milaniak — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 21:24:06 +0000

Nobody likes to make difficult decisions that could potentially cost a lot of money or have a direct impact on the team. Making these decisions is especially hard when you have to decide without any supporting data and you are forced to listen to your emotions and do the judgment by yourself.

Metrics are your best guidance

“You cannot improve what you cannot measure”, sound like a kind of cliché, but information and data are one of your best helpers when it comes to deciding, whether to pay for that service or hire a new developer. It is up to you as a team leader and I know it can be really hard to make important calls. Are you not sure, whether to hire that new front-end developer, because you don't know if your team really needs him? Reach for your teams' statistics. Failed to meet deadlines and your average PR resolution time is 4 months? There is your answer.
MIT Sloan School of Management professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson performed a study in cooperation with MIT's Centre for Digital Business and the study shows, that data-driven companies are subject to a 4% higher productivity as well as 6% higher profits. Surveyed companies ranging from small startups to multi-million conglomerates stated, that the use of data-driven decision making has an overall positive impact throughout all the company levels and departments, from HR to Business Development.

What can be the driving metrics to support your decisions?

I would like to focus on decisions around your team. Many of these metrics go tie-to-tie with good Developer Experience. Your team's performance could be measured in average PR resolve time, average time to solve PR. Other indicators of your team's quality could be security issues, code style issues, or how many outdated libraries you have on your projects. It may seem like these are seemingly different indicators, but it all ties together and a great team needs to conquer all these metrics. There are many more ways to determine your team's quality and let's be honest — I know not all of them are measurable.

Right tools, right decisions

To support your decisions and to monitor your Developer Experience you can use available tools. Unfortunately, unlike in User Experience, DX is a fairly new industry, thus there are not that many complex tools to accompany you and become your go-to place. Our advanced tool DX Scanner made by seasoned devs and team leaders at DX Heroes aggregates all the important data and metrics to one dashboard. This is by far the most complex tool on the market right now. On this dashboard, you can find everything you need to make decisions around your team and to better your Developer Experience.
I will not mindlessly shill — Our product speaks for itself. You can try DX Scanner for free on this link: Try DX Scanner

Sources: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704547804576260781324726782

Why is Hacktoberfest the perfect opportunity for devs to improve

Dominik Milaniak — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 08:20:40 +0000

With COVID-19 lurking in the shadows and gaining strength as Autumn approaches, the original version of the traditional German festival seems unlikely to happen. Why not crack a cold one next to your computer and celebrate the open source software.

About Hacktoberfest

This month-long event could be described as a celebration of open source software. Developers and other enthusiasts are encouraged to contribute to their favorite open source repositories and help owners fix some bugs or create new features. By the end of the month, you can get a reward from Digital Ocean - organizers of Hacktoberfest.

Beginners, Intermediates.. doesn't matter!

It of course differs from repo to repo, but it is a convention to label the issues with their difficulty, so a beginner could select something his skills are sufficient and the intermediate or senior can choose the right issues for him to further progress his skills. This event is truly for everyone.

The Hacktoberfest is about community

This code is good, right?

Well, I don't know, but I am certain who will - repository owners a.k.a senior developers, and other battle-hardened professionals 🤓 These devs can provide valuable feedback to your pull requests, which can progress your skills and give you a bigger picture, what to focus on, where to learn that, and how can you avoid similar mistakes. I cannot speak for everyone, but we at DX Heroes will definitely provide this feedback to all of our amazing contributors and we encourage others to do as well.

Cannot code, but still want to participate

This event was always mainly for developers, but that doesn't mean people like tech writers cannot participate as well! 🤩 You will likely have a harder time finding suitable repos for your contributions there are definitely some open source blogs or knowledge bases (like ours DX Knowledge Base, wink wink 😆). Hacktoberfest is truly about community and doesn't matter if you are dev, designer, tech writer, or just an enthusiast - we can progress open source software to a whole new level, together.

The Hacktoberfest 2020 is starting in just 13 days - prepare your pull requests, improve the open source projects, learn new things, and most importantly - let's have tons of fun!

DEV Community: Dominik Milaniak