Kaizen is the practice and art of continuously improving your processes. I explore how kaizen can be applied in engineering teams and what the benefits are.

We can get more done together, achieve better results for the business, and enjoy it more by fostering a generative team culture.

I've been working remotely for more than 2 years in multiple roles both as an individual contributor and a leader. Most recently I have been remotely leading a team of 6 -- 3 based out of an office and 3 remote. As a development manager, I hired 5 out of 6 members on my team and was able to create the team culture from scratch. I've strived to created a culture that is remote-friendly and treats everyone as equals no matter where they are located. Here are some guidelines I've followed to help to create a remote-friendly culture.

One of my core principles for working effectively is to always be capturing. No matter what I'm working on, even if the work is abstract and conceptual, I want to always be creating some artifact that represents the current mental work and can be shared later. This applies in both an individual and group setting. I'd like to share some of the practices I've developed and how they may benefit you.

In November 2015 I gave a talk at WordCamp Edinburgh called "No constraints - building a minimum viable product with WordPress". I told the story of how we used WordPress to build a vision of what the University of St Andrews' web presence might look like while I was working in the Digital communications team there.

Even in the advanced world of 2016 there are still reasons to build web sites that work without JavaScript. Supporting plain HTML without JavaScript to be fair is more difficult, but that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. I see it as a question of accessibility. Building a website that requires JavaScript for any functionality is like building a new multistory building without an elevator because almost everyone can climb stairs.