What must exist for a community to be vibrant and healthy? In this week’s show, EJ Allen and TJ Taylor, CTO and Staff Engineer at Mobilize, answer this question. They join Etienne de Bruin to dig into trunk-based development, feature flags, and how community and personal connection drive business. 

Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:

Community is the tide that raises all boats. Building communities of trust and connecting with people can unlock potential for everyone. 

What it means to be part of a thriving community is the same across professional and personal networks. The key components of creating a vibrant network include trust, empathy, and unlocking potential. 

In software development, you must be able to take risks and be vulnerable with your team. This means that you essentially eliminate the consequences of making a mistake, allowing your team to experience psychological safety.

Building habits is one of the ways to create pits of success. That translates into looking at the habits of the people around you and figuring out how to leverage those habits to get the desired behavior. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. 

Think about how you're adding value to your customer. At the end of the day, your work is not necessarily as important as the work that your team is delivering to the customer.  

"Being able to get 1% better a day makes you 37 times better in a year. Try not to worry so much about what can I get done in a day or what can I get done this week… Instead, just focus on how can I deliver the smallest amount of value as consistently as possible?" 

You need every leg of the stool to be successful. That requires trust, empathy, and connection in your team. 


Resources
EJ Allen | LinkedIn 
TJ Taylor | LinkedIn 
Mobilize 
Refactoring by Kent Beck
Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers