In 2012 I was promoted to lead developer. We have a team of 24 developers and we expect to continue growing quickly. My goals for 2013 are focussed around team and team building.

Recruiting / Interviewing

I’m not a recruiter and I’m not going to email random people and tell them they should apply to work at Bloom Health, but I can be a part of recruiting efforts by a) being more visible in the community as a representative of bloom and b) attending recruiting events at local colleges. I am going to a career fair this week in fact.Interviewing is hard. In fact I would rather be interviewed than interview someone else. This is probably because I like to talk and being interviewed is a great time to talk. It’s also my downfall while interviewing other people because I need to listen and not talk for once. Additionally I need to be more prepared when I go into an interview or technical phone screen.

Onboarding

I want to make sure new employees have a good experience as they come onto our team. I don’t have anyone directly reporting to me but as a lead I need to do a better job of making sure that people integrate with the team quickly.

Mentoring

Mentoring is almost an extension of onboarding. The most obvious opportunity for mentoring is for the developers on my scrum team. I want to encourage more pair programming and try to pair with all three of those developers on a regular basis. Outside of that I need to find opportunities to mentor members of the larger team. Last year I had a coderetreat that was open to the entire Twin Cities and I’d like to do events like this with the team at Bloom.

The challenge is to do things and to continue to deliver on my normal engineering responsibilities. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of good references for building technical teams and effectively mentoring technical people. If anyone has a good book or blog recommendation I’d love to hear it!