Coding Culture

by Sven Peters 

One day we woke up and realized that our days are filled with all kind of stuff unrelated to code or product, that our goals are driven by product owners, and that our code design is dictated by architects trying to tell us how we should solve problems. A strong coding culture gives the power back to the developer to concentrate on one thing: Create awesome stuff!

Imagine a culture where the input of the whole organization turns an individual idea into a user story in just a couple of hours; where everybody’s goal is to make the customer awesome, and where you work on stuff you love instead stuff you loathe. A great coding culture concentrates on making developers productive and happy by removing unnecessary overhead, bringing autonomous teams together, helping the individual programmer to innovate, and raising the awareness among the developers to create better code.

I will talk about how to establish and foster a strong engineering-focused culture that scales from a small team to a huge organization with hundreds of developers. I’ll give lots of examples from our experience at Atlassian to show that once you’re working in a great coding culture, you won’t want to work anywhere else.