Cosmic Thoughts

My First Lean Coffee

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¡Hola! 😄

This week I had the amazing opportunity to attend for the first time a Lean Coffee. If you want to learn more about what Lean Coffee is, read here !

The Steps of Lean Coffee

  1. Gather into groups (I’d say groups with <= 6 people)
  2. Each person writes the topic they’d like to discuss in a post-it
  3. After all the topics have been gathered, each person gets 2,3,4 votes (depending on the number of people in the group) to use on which ever topics they like or would like to discuss
  4. Order the topics based on the number of votes (topics with more votes first)
  5. Start discussing in iterations
  6. First iteration is time boxed to 6 minutes. After first iteration we vote to:
  • Continue the discussion (thumbs up)
  • Stop the discussion (thumbs down)
  • I don’t mind (thumbs in the between?)
  1. Depending on the number of votes, the discussion continues a next iteration or the topic is changed. Second and next iterations are time boxed to 4 minutes.

Topics

These are some topics that we discussed and I found interesting.

How do we get more empathy between teams and roles?

How can we understand each other better in when we come from different backgrounds and have different roles in a company? e.g. Engineering, Product, Marketing, etc.

Ideas

These are some of the ideas that were discussed:

  • It’s mainly based in culture and values of people
  • Interview people for values, make values a priority during your interviews
  • Take time to understand why people are clashing
  • Be Transparent about your expectations and your goals and the goals of your company
  • Take time to understand what other people value
  • Improve communication between teams and people
  • Have cross team KPIs instead of single teams KPIs (this will help bring people together)
  • Understand and be OK with knowing that you are all different and be open to discuss

Learning new programming languages

What drives you to learn new programming languages? What are some of the techniques you use to learn new programming languages? How do you pick that new language to learn?

Ideas

  • Values and culture could be related to the programming language used?
  • Before choosing a programming language, have clarity on the problem that you are trying to solve
  • When you are choosing a technology or programming language to build your product, choose to: Hire the people you want instead of the people you find.
  • When you are looking for a new language to learn:
    1. Think about the things that you are going to need based on your next goals. For example: if you want to move to a certain city, look for most used programming languages / technologies in that city. This will open more doors for you.
    2. Look for the next trends in technology and pick up a language that can help you in the future.
    3. Pick a language just to have fun!

Quotes

Here are some quotes that I liked:

I started to learn Go but then I let it go :-D

It is OK to have many things to fix, as long as you are getting better or things are getting better. It is important to have a sense of progress.