teamwork

Game Development / Personal Project Updates / Programming

ProjectXyz: Why I Started A Team For My Hobby Project

Who Needs A Team?! I've been building RPG backends for as long as I've been able to code. I think my first one that I made for my grade 11 class is the only RPG that I "finished"... It was text-based and all you could do was fight AI via clicking attack, buy better weapons, level up, and repeat. It was also 10000 lines of VB6 code and so brutal that I couldn't add anything to it without copying hundreds of lines of code. Since then, I've had the itch. I keep rewriting this thing. I keep taking "Text RPG" (super cool and catchy, I know) and rewriting it. I had my first visual representation of this game called Macerus (here's another rewrite for unity), which is actually how I landed my first co-op job. But every time I'd get…

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June 20, 2018
Leadership & Management

Continuous Improvement – One on One Tweaks (Pt. 2)

Continuing With Continuous Improvement I wrote about continuous improvement before and how I've been trying to tie that into my leadership role through changes to my one on one process. To recap, at our organization we try to roll continuous improvement into most things that we do. We're well aware that we're not going to get things perfect the first time, so as long as we have a process in place to learn, reflect, and adapt, then we can make changes to better our situation. It's something that's ongoing and it doesn't really have an end. So long as your organization is growing and changing over time, or the environment in which your organization is changing over time, having continuous improvement baked into your culture is key to success. Previously, I mentioned that at Magnet Forensics I hold regular one…

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August 18, 2014
Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Performance Reviews – Weekly Article Dump

Performance Reviews It's almost the end of the year, and performance reviews for many companies are just around the corner. This will be the first time for me sitting on the other side of a performance review. I'm excited, and to be honest, a little nervous about how it will all play out. I know our HR manager has done an excellent job putting together our initial take on performance reviews, but it's still going to be up to me to ensure that all aspects of a performance review are communicated properly to my team. It's definitely going to be an interesting time of year! I've started doing a little bit of reading on performance reviews. From what I can tell, the general consensus is that most performance review systems are flawed and nobody knows the perfect way to do…

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November 25, 2013
Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Team Theme – Weekly Article Dump

Articles The Real Reason People Won’t Change: Admittedly, when I read this article on my phone the full posting wasn't available to me. I was only able to read the first page of the article, but the concept was enough to get me interested. "Competing commitments". Heard of it? I hadn't but it seems to explain a lot. Competing commitments are, as you might have expected, commitments to things that are in conflict. The article has a ton of examples, but the concept of competing commitments offers insight as to why some people seem stubborn in their ways, despite everything else being lined up for success. A simple example might be someone who is a die-hard advocate of the project they are working on and really wants it to succeed. However, they're actually inhibiting the success of the project because…

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October 27, 2013
Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Recognition – Weekly Article Dump

Recognition - Weekly Article Dump Not all of the articles this week touch on recognition, and to be honest, I didn't pick it as a theme for the articles either. Recognition is more a topic of discussion that's come up over the last week at Magnet Forensics, where I work. Being a team lead and part of the management team at Magnet, I'm often part of conversations about motivation. Providing recognition is an excellent way to motivate your staff and shows that you truly appreciate them. We've been trying to get better at recognizing staff for doing an awesome job--especially because we have so many awesome people working with us. It's pretty obvious with our Profit Hot 50 placement that we've got some kick-ass people. Recognition, whether it's one-on-one or in a public setting, has a huge impact. I don't…

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September 14, 2013
CodeProject / Programming / Startups & Small Business

It’s Our Code

Background I’m sure what I’m about to talk about here doesn’t just relate to programming–it relates to any team-based project where everyone works on a small portion of the big picture. My experiences are primarily geared toward writing code in teams, so try to find parallels in your own work/experiences if you’re not a programmer. Anyway, enough of that. When someone puts a lot of effort into something, they’ll often take great pride in the finished product. Of course, it’s great that they do! They’ve slaved away at something at work for days, weeks, or months, and it’s finally working/implemented. Other people are using it and it’s doing its job as expected. Awesome! What kinds of things could possibly go sour here? If you have experience working in teams to complete a project, you might have some ideas. Ownership You…

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August 7, 2013

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