Some Thoughts about Personal Development Goals for Software Engineers

Interview: How Atlassian Responds to Cloud Concerns and Over-Configuration of Tools

I recently attended Team ‘24, Atlassian’s flagship conference, where I had the chance to meet with Matt Schvimmer, Senior Vice President and Head of Product for Atlassian’s Agile and DevOps portfolio. We discussed how Atlassian tools support modern software development.

Atlassian tools like Jira, Bitbucket, Compass, and the newly announced Focus play a critical role for teams operating in complex environments. Schvimmer provided insights into the evolution of Atlassian’s tools and their future roadmap. He also addressed challenges such as synchronizing documentation with code, managing microservice complexity, and tackling tool over-configuration or cloud-related concerns.

Marcus Held

New Position and the Future of This Blog

Today I write an unusual post for this blog - A personal note. I recently took the responsibility of the System & Infrastructure department. As you can imagine taking over such a position comes along with a lot of work - especially when you didn’t get rid of the old responsibilities yet. That’s the main reason why I didn’t write a blog in the past months.

But what about the future of this blog? In my new responsibility I’m farther away from the actual technology and on this blog I especially focused on that. I don’t know how it will turn out for me, but when I managed to get into the new role and sorted out how I want to approach things, I definitely plan to get closer again. Until then, I might write a blog once in a while. I don’t know about what yet. And it might be about some management stuff as well - but time will show. This blog was and is a platform for me to sort things out for myself, organize my thoughts, and to make my argumentation’s comprehensible. And it will remain like that.

Marcus Held

Some Thoughts about Personal Development Goals for Software Engineers

Personal development goals in software engineering are not trivial to define. In general, goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). But in reality our field of expertise is that diverse and complex that it is not as easy to find those goals like in other professions. For someone working in the sales department a revenue goal is easy to define and to decide whether he succeeded or not. For us software developers it is different. In order to improve we need abstract goals that are independent enough to survive in our agile day-to-day business. I received many goals in the past, and a lot of them felt wrong, unfair and not helpful for my personal development. For my employees I took another approach. The overall goal needs to be to enable your colleagues and in this post I describe how I achieve that.

Marcus Held

Automate Your Git Commits On Feature Branches

At some point it hits everyone. Your precious work of several hours is vanished because of a hardware failure. For that the industry came up with several solutions like the idea of version control systems. But recently I was dumb enough to not do any commit for several hours - just to leave the history clean. Big mistake… But did you think about automating that? How about committing every couple of minutes automatically? In this post I’ll explain this - on the first sight - weird workflow.

Marcus Held

Clean Already Merged Branches in Git

Another month, another git alias (But don’t think that this will become a regularity now ;-) ). I had the issue that I lost track of the branches that were already in master a couple of times on one of my projects and after a while I had a lot of unnecessary jobs in Jenkins because we use the Jenkins multibranch plugin . So I sat down and created a git alias that does the cleanup for you with a bit of user-friendly output.

Marcus Held