Software projects succeed or fail based on the quality of the teams behind them. Expert developers can be hard to find. So how do you get junior developers to level up? It’s not enough to teach how to use a framework or tech stack. Good developers can follow a pattern.

Software engineering is one of the most challenging endeavors we can engage in today. Successful software projects must address the vast scope of today’s applications while paying meticulous attention to the small details that can make the difference between a fast, efficient system and a slow, cumbersome burden.

Most agile product teams have heard the concepts around using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to learn about what customers want, Lean Startup style, but the process of defining an MVP to fulfill those goals often proves to be easier said than done. Let it be reiterated that an MVP in software development is not needed when the market and/or user needs are well known, leading to much confusion and dilution of terminology commonality in which the enterprise world has used the term to simply refer to the first release of any product and the inevitable scoping such a release receives.

Outsourcing is such a dirty word. Unbearable customer service, subpar manufacturing, and corporate downsizing all come to mind when you hear it.

While the SitePen team is widely known for its expertise in building JavaScript and TypeScript applications, providing support and training to enterprise teams, and for helping create Dojo and Intern, it also has a fair amount of insight and expertise with helping teams be more effective. Whether it’s Milestone Mayhem or InnerSource or just knowing how to keep software projects running smoothly, we’re often called upon to help organisations be more productive in modernising their approach to building applications.

With years of building large scale web apps, we’ve experienced almost everything that goes right and wrong during software development projects. So we created Milestone Mayhem, a card game that reflects the challenges and successes with app development.

Day 2 of the Lead Developer Conference continued with a series of excellent talks. Be sure to check out the Day 1 recap if you missed it.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Lead Developer Conference, a two-day, single-track conference with over 400 development leads from the UK, Europe, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. The event included an excellent array of speakers representing development leads at companies including Slack, Atlassian, ThoughtWorks, Amazon Web Services, GitHub, Shopify, Couchbase, and many other organizations.