DEV Community: Elle Meredith

Signs of a healthy culture

Elle Meredith — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 06:28:05 +0000

Everyone knows that a healthy team culture is good for the organisation. We all want to have a healthy culture. We like to think we are promoting a healthy culture. But how do we know?

In this article, Nicola discusses the six elements of a healthy team culture, and what the healthy and unhealthy cultures look like — which should give you ideas on what you could do to nurture your own culture.

To read more, check it out here!

Test driven development (TDD) with RSpec workshop in July

Elle Meredith — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:07:07 +0000

Do you feel uncomfortable working with RSpec? Unsure what to test and how writing tests helps you to write better code? Would you like to build an effective and fast testing environment?

I am running a workshop on test driven development (TDD) in Ruby with RSpec in July.

In four days, you will learn everything you need to know to start practicing TDD. You will understand the basics, apply best practices, learn the difference between test helpers (stubs, mocks, double, spies), create a fake server for testing apis, and optimise your test suite run time. Basically, become proficient with RSpec.

To learn more and get your ticket, visit our website. Early tickets are available now!

Leading with authority vs influence

Elle Meredith — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 04:31:08 +0000

The role of staff engineer is a leadership role in most organisations. Staff engineers don't have direct reports in a people management sense. They lead projects, initiatives, and display leadership in their daily work.

Leading projects and initiatives are examples of leadership from authority. You are in charge of delivering a project, thus you get to tell people what to do! Same goes for a cross-team initiative you're leading to improve developer experience. These are explicit leadership situations. The third case is all about implicit leadership and that's where influence comes in.

What is the difference between the two? and which should you use when?

Continue reading at https://blackmill.co/blog/lead-with-authority-vs-influence

Community of practice for engineering managers

Elle Meredith — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:26:03 +0000

A call out to 1st and 2nd year engineering managers! We're developing a community of practice program to bring every day real life challenges to the table to share, reflect, explore, learn, and grow together. What are some of the challenges that you are currently having?

Transformational or empowering leadership styles create better leaders in the Internet Age

Elle Meredith — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 07:48:19 +0000

Geographically dispersed teams are becoming a necessity as the trend of remote working continues. Leaders need to adapt their approach to take this into account. Transformational or empowering leadership styles help especially when we are all remote. Well this is the academic essay I wrote for my studies. The rest of it is at: https://blackmill.co/blog/transformational-or-empowering-leadership-styles-create-better-leaders