Training session between Russell and Brandon. We met over a Zoom meeting and talked about all kinds of project management styles and techniques. Russell was showing me stuff on his Notion app, how he organizes things, and all of the cool drag and drop type styles for his to do lists and project boards. Lots of linking back and forth and dynamics. We talked about IT structures and how to best manage teams. We talked about scrum, agile, sprint (if you know what to do) and kanban (one project at a time from start to finish).

It comes down to what are your resources, timelines, and talent pool. Do you know what you want to get done or is it more open? The dev team does the story points. Not everybody can do virtual (meaning the work environment). Some people really need some handholding and someone to watch over them. Those are harder to manage virtually. The virtual guys/gals need to be somewhat self-driven and self-motivated. Are the developers full stack (able to do the whole thing - start to finish) or are they limited and/or specialized (just a few of the tasks are suitable for them)? Lots of questions and different styles.

One thing that I was shocked with was how many different tools Russell has to use to keep all of his things going and flowing. Tons of different software and web apps like: Jira, notion, Git, Toggle, Google Drive, all of their internals, and tons of others. We do some of that as well, but Russell had a bunch more. Just me speaking, but no thank you. I've got plenty plus a few.

We flipped back to talking about sprints and getting into a grove. Other topics included owning a task and that is just the starting point, a task is never the end all be all. Helping to share understanding. Also getting help and helping to complete certain tasks. Somewhat of a shared workload vs just owning a certain task and being done with it.

People see things differently. Kinda like the telephone game, what you hear and pass on may not be the actual thing that you are trying to do and/or achieve. It is more of a process of growing and becoming vs just being or having (all at once).

Russell was sharing some of the stuff that he goes over with his guys in the interview process. His interviews are like 3.5 hours long and pretty brutal, testing all kinds of different levels and personality type stuff. We talked about documentation. Other things like dependency injection and how testable are things with dynamics vs hardcoded or static values. We got into testing, mocking data, logic test, integration test, etc. It got pretty deep. Russell is trying to mix all kinds of data and tools to get the testing coverage that he wants. He was even getting numbers and test results (scores) back on some of his processes. He was then using those scores to keep refining until he had less crappy code and in theory, better results.

Spent some time talking about breaking things up into smaller pieces. Using flow charts, wireframes, and other schematic type design tools to show the overview of what the functions and/or processes do or could do. I liked that. He had some new big words for me - I didn't fully understand them. Just being silly, but one of the things he was talking about was "Cyclomatic Complexity" and other things. I thought that it was kinda funny and it made me laugh. I kept thinking, if I don't know that... how am I supposed to teach that or expect it from my guys. Just having fun. I did grab a few screenshots with some of his memes and graphics. See attached. Nothing too special.