I was part of the Microsoft layoffs in June 2023. While I was initially upset with it, and particularly with how it happened (though I can't share details), it turned out to be one of the more positive things that happened for me recently. You see, I was burned out.…
This is the third instalment on building products at scale. Part 1 covered the backlog & refinement sessions, and Part 2 covered the planning. Now, let's get back to engineering, and discuss how to support the process. If you’re still following, what we have now is: * Regular Trains departing our…
In this blog post, we'll cover an interesting topic that came up as part of my contributions to the Microsoft Disaster Response (MSDR) effort. With the Ukraine war, one of the biggest challenges for the rest of the world is displaced people. The Microsoft MSDR contribution provided some options in…
In Part I [https://www.vodovnik.com/2022/07/08/how-id-build-products/], we ended up with a well-defined product backlog. Our Engineering Team can go into their Sprint Planning with a list of well-refined list of User Stories and plan their sprint. However, the Engineering team does not live in a…
Years ago, I wrote about how I would run a software development shop [https://medium.com/@avodovnik/a094642de166]. As I now have a chance to put most of those thoughts into practice I am greeted by the next set of challenges in my career path - how do you actually…
I'm excited to announce that starting March 1st, I will be joining the Visual Studio for Mac team. Based out of Ljubljana, this role will be both a massive change and a massive challenge. This also means moving back to Slovenia and I wanted to write down some thoughts on moving abroad for work.…
I've recently been lucky enough to work with Movesense [https://www.movesense.com] sensors. They're built by a Finnish company called Suunto, which most of us know as the manufacturer of dive computers, and watches. I worked with Andy Wigley on the library [https://github.com/AndyCW/MovesenseDotNet] that enables…
It finally happened. I finally decided to move my blog from the old Wordpress system to Ghost [https://ghost.org/]. I started the project about 3 months ago, working on the code and migration when I had some spare time. It took a bunch of time, because I wrote some…