Tag: Programming

Using Slack to Be a Better Team Member

I am currently working out how I can be a better team member. I think one of the key parts of a team member is to ensure you are helping all of your team to become better programmers. By helping them to find the answer when they are asking questions and reviewing there code when they submit pull requests to give constructive feedback.

At work we use Slack as one of our communication tools. Other than just talking to each other it is the main way we ask each other questions or announce that a pull request is ready for review. I have started to use the Highlight Words of Slack feature to alert me to when there are members of my team looking for help but not directly asking me a question.

The Highlight Words feature allows you to provide a comma separated list a set of key words and phrases that you want to be alerted to as if someone has used @here or @username in one of the channel.

This is the current list of words and phrases I use to get alerts when someone is looking for help.

not sure why, for some reason, don’t get it, dont get it, make sense, makes no sense, help, question

I also use the pattern below to setup alerts for pull request links being posted on slack. I use this pattern so I only receive alerts about repositories I am interested in.

/[organisation]/[repo]/pull

 

If you are going to use them make sure you setup alerts for highlighting words at the top of the page.

Using this also means that I spend less time reading through slack.

 

This setting can be different for each of the teams you are in. Setup can be done here.

[team subdomain].slack.com/account/notifications

 

Imposter Syndrome Lightning Talk (Video)

I recently gave a ten minute talk about Imposter Syndrome at a Lightning Talk session organised at work. Here is the video of that talk.

I decided to give the talk because I had been suffering with Imposter Syndrome for quite some time and for a lot of that time I did not realise that other developers suffered with the same fears that I did.

I wanted to share my experiences with Imposter Syndrome.
Why it affected me?
How it affected me?
How I am attempting to get over it.
To let others that are suffering with Imposter Syndrome that it is not just them that feel like that and It is possible to get past it.

This is also the same talk I gave as a lightning talk PHP North West Conference.

I hope to extend this 10 minute lightning talk into a slightly longer talk. I am not sure it could stretch to a full hour conference slot, but I think I could get it to 30 minutes meetup talk. If anyone has a meetup they would like me to present this talk at please get in contact I would love to hear from you.