Team Geek

Appendix A. Epilogue

We’ve covered an awful lot of topics in this book. After closing the cover it may be hard to figure out which parts to embrace in your daily life. After all, what’s the point of reading a book like this if it doesn’t result in some changes in the way you work? What happens now?

Let’s keep things simple. If you remember anything at all about our stories, remember HRT: humility, respect, and trust.

As we explained in the first chapter, these three core traits are the things that need to underlie every social action you make and every relationship you cultivate. And if you look carefully you’ll find that nearly every social problem stems from a lack of one of these traits.

Remember that HRT applies to all your different “spheres” of influence. It applies to you before anything else: these traits affect every individual communication you make. It applies to your team: a culture based on humility, respect, and trust will spend the most time coding and the least time infighting. It applies to the way people lead teams: skilled leaders serve their teams and not the other way around. HRT also applies to the way you interoperate with and survive temporary collaborators outside your team, whether they are nice folks, jerks, or a dysfunctional bureaucracy. And finally, these principles apply directly to the way you interact with the most important group of all—the users of your software.

If you keep HRT at the forefront of the way you work, you’ll have greater impact with ...