- Spidey-Sense – Rands in Repose
Quote: "The colorful phrase is “shit rolls downhill.” The inversion of that statement is also true: “fires burn faster uphill.” The further you are up the organizational chart, the further you are up the hill, the more fuel there is for the fire. Teams often successful extinguish small fires before you ever see them, but the ones that get to you are burning, and they are burning hot and often unstoppable."
(categories: management leadership spidey-sense )
- Fast Software, the Best Software — by Craig Mod
Quote: "Speed manifests in the language — the literal words — of software, too. In recent years, macOS dialogs for closing an unsaved file have shifted from “Don’t Save, Cancel, Save” to “Delete, Cancel, Save.” This is only my opinion, but “Delete, Cancel, Save” makes less sense than “Don’t Save, Cancel, Save.” The option to “delete” implies something as having once been saved. Did I save this and forget I saved it? Or did it auto-save?" Same.
(categories: design software performance )
- The limits of "unlimited" vacation | Jacob Kaplan-Moss
I’ve been at companies that had it and didn’t have it… I prefer it but with the equitable system described here (tracked but unlimited, encouraging employees to take it, setting clear expectations on what is normal).
(categories: vacation work culture time )
- Psychological Safety: 5 Ways to Create a Culture of Psychological Safety
Quote: "Evaluate psychological safety with these 5 questions Think of a team you work with closely. How strongly do you agree with these five statements? If I take a chance, and screw up, it will be held against me Our team has a strong sense of culture that can be hard for new people to join. My team is slow to offer help to people who are struggling. Using my unique skills and talents come second to the objectives of the team. It’s uncomfortable to have open honest conversations about our team’s sensitive issues." The entire blog post is great.
(categories: team management culture psychology )
- Square’s Growth Framework for Engineers and Engineering Managers | Square Corner Blog
Another career ladder example for engineering.
(categories: career engineering management )
- The 10 Slack Agreements of Buffer – Open
Agree with these… got scolded at my last job for sending late night slacks ("you’re setting a bad example!") but I think the Buffer philosophy ("You’re responsible for managing your downtime") is better.
(categories: slack culture communication collaboration )
- When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop
LOVE the metrics (memory usage by size of team) at the bottom as a KPI.
(categories: engineering metrics rewrite slack )
- Innovation Isn’t All Fun and Games — Creativity Needs Discipline
Quote: "A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor. Collaboration must be balanced with individual accountability. And flatness requires strong leadership. "
(categories: culture innovation management collaboration business )
- 4 principles for massive software engineering projects
Quote: ".. We did a bunch of things right to make this giant program work. Chief among them are the four engineering principles we used to plan and execute the project: All-in – This was a massive program and it needed the entire company, from exec to intern, behind it. Attack the riskiest assumption – Don’t think “MVP.” Think about what the riskiest part of the entire program is, and focus on that until it’s no longer the top risk. Incremental, even when it hurts – Reduce risk by breaking the migration into as many small parts as possible, even when that increases dev time. Sprint to 100% – In this program, the payoff was when we could completely stop deploying to the old infrastructure. Don’t slow down or lose focus until you are done, done, done, and done. These, along with our company values (especially “don’t f**k the customer” and “build with heart and balance”), formed the foundation for the entire project."
(categories: atlassian monolith engineering refactor software prioritization )
- What is Hedonic Adaptation and How Can it Turn You Into a Sucka?
Quote: "In no particular order, the biggest factors influencing human happiness include meaningful work (with lots of autonomy, low stress, and low fear of losing your job), private life, community, health, freedom, and a philosophy of life."
(categories: life culture money philosophy values happiness work )
- Four Magic Numbers for Measuring Software Delivery – ONZO Technology – Medium
Quote: "…there are 24 capabilities that are correlated with high performing software delivery organisations. Broadly speaking these fall into a few categories; Continuous Delivery — How well do you build small batches, test them and push them to production frequently? Like… Really frequently Architecture — Does your systems architecture empower teams to work independently and deliver features end-to-end? Product & Process — Are you building the right thing? And learning how to do it better Lean Management & Monitoring — Is your approval process for moving a binary to production lightweight and effective? Once it gets to production how well does your platform share its operational health? Cultural — Does your environment support people in learning, growing and collaborating? Does the leadership inspire, support and provide vision for the team?"
(categories: metrics engineering software management architecture process monitoring )
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