Work

The Zendesk story of how they built a globally distributed company is quite amazing, but there are many more like this by now.

Some friends of ours have started a coworking space in Berlin hat includes childcare. The space looks great and I think that flexible solutions like this could alleviate a lot of the burden on parents right now.

Ages ago we also made a game that:

Not just one thing that every dev should know but a bag full of hard won non-technical multipliers that will improve all of your interactions in this podcast episode with Jesica Kerr.

I want to echo this and add that once you realize what the git `master` refers to, it is unconscionable that we reproduce it so often and so callously every day of our working lives. (Disclosure: Alicia reports to me.)

This interview with Marc Andreessen is mostly interesting for the talk about productivity and operations.

Challengers are great if they carry both sets of qualities: both questioning and delivering.

An overview of the philosophical and technical revolutions that are necessary to be able to develop in production. It’s a long way but I believe even the journey to get there is worth it.

People think they don’t have the time to write so they’ll have a meeting instead which is probably the worst thing they could do, but it’s easy.

so people never settle … they simply won’t stop tweaking their tools, instead of focusing on the actual work.

The Spotify model wasn’t even a silver bullet for Spotify and it definitely wasn’t one for all the organizations that simply copied it.

A useful article that slices the valuable insights in High Output Management for non-managers (tech leads, seniors, etc.).

Companies insisting on long hours is probably only one thing holding women back, but this article goes deep on that one question and uncovers a panoply of assumptions and attitudes.

“When people say that telecommuting isn’t as efficient or as effective as working co-located, it’s probably because they don’t know how to do it well, not because it’s not doable. The thing is, it’s all learnable if people want to learn it. And I’d say it’s important to learn. Even before coronavirus, I’ve always felt that knowing how to manage well remotely was a competitive advantage.”

“Wie kann es sein, dass die aufwändig erarbeiteten und austarierten Betreuungs- und Versorgungsnetze aus Kita, Schule, Hort, Babysitter*in, Großeltern, Tagesmutter-/vater und weiteren Mitbetreuenden, von Verpflegung in Einrichtungen und haushaltsnahen Dienstleistungen von heute auf morgen von behördlicher Seite gestrichen werden, ohne dass gleichzeitig Aussichten auf Kompensations- und Unterstützungsangebote gemacht werden?”

That is a fully comprehensive and excellent list of guidelines to unlearn toxic behaviour in code reviews by Sandya Sankarram.

I’m glad that this takedown of Clean Code by Dan Abramov got so much traction. I have no problem with clean code (lowercase), but inevitably the process of getting there and the things people do as a consequence make the entire endeavor an anti-pattern.

A nice write-up of how Gitlab diagnosed and fixed an outage before it could even happen.

“Slack eliminates hierarchy time and space.”

I too love taking notes just like Tanya Reilly here and I wish more people would take better notes.

Truly, if you don’t throw hundreds of millions into the trash fire that is the big consultancies, there is no limit to what you can get done.

Always nice to read a positive career history from somebody, like this one by Alicia Hickey, but especially nice if you’re in it named as the team lead who made a crucial suggestion.

Some stuff about meditation and work by Chiara Cokieng that I find repeatedly useful so I’m putting it here for reference.

“the resilience of a system corresponds to its adaptive capacity tuned to the future.”

STATE My Path: 2 Explore Others’ Paths: 3 Move To Action: 1 Start With Heart: 0 Learn To Look: 2 Make It Safe: 3 Master My Stories: 3 Zero to three, higher is better.

“But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.”

Long overdue to take down Clayton Christensen a couple of notches (but then again any theory so widespread can’t be anything other than wrong).

Will Larson (whose new book is lying on my desk at work) writes a welcome long view on the technology career, something we will increasingly need to think about and come to terms with.

Having gone through these myself, it’s good to see this planning framework that is at the same time high level and immediately deployable.

I’ll trust Artefact Cards when they say they have something that’s better than the Sharpie.

I’ve always been a product-minded software engineer as is described here (just curious about everything).

My colleague Jiro Minier is featured in the Dahrendorf Foresight Project on European Security with a scenario that is both dystopian and scarily prescient. I read it as a call for more European collaboration and investment.

I’m finding that I really enjoy the role of management for the reasons listed in this piece below and some more even.

This piece by Arthur C. Brooks about professional decline, touching on Hinduism, Buddhism and many many more things is quite something.

Slack says that letting people do a code review as a take-home gives a similar or maybe even better signal when hiring.

An amazing and inspiring play-by-play of how Clio doubled their representation of women by improving their hiring game and setting a quota.

I think everybody (myself included) can and should get better at managing up. This guide by Claire Lew has some helpful tips that mostly boil down to: “context”.

Teams just like so many Microsoft products is so bad that people have to be forced to use it.

Twenty-four survival tips for women by Patricia Aas that I wholeheartedly support but wish were not necessary.

Working in organizations, it’s essential to be able to differentiate between things that are under your purview, and things that you should let fall on the floor. Camille Fournier writes a guide here about how to decide what to fix and how to fix that.

Ten principles for how to grow as an engineer that are as true as the day they were written.

I’d say a lot of this criticism of React is fair but because all frameworks have jumped onto components, I don’t really see a realistic workable alternative either.

An excellent short piece by Emily Nakashima about the various ways that power bends reality. It is well worth keeping in mind even especially if you are the person who has power.

We were represented at PM Camp last week and here’s a blog post (in German) by Alicia, one of my team members about the way we work.

After this piece, I’m totally sold on the benefits of mentoring (and registered myself on Coding Coach). I would be open to mentor a couple of people on engineering/product management/leadership.

Not enough popcorn in the world to read this exposé on Booking.com.

One of the most well-known examples of code reuse between Android and iOS, Dropbox, is giving up on it because it’s too difficult to find people who can/want to write C++ code.

Mid to large size teams can accrue dependencies like a katamari and then they’ll be wondering why their node_modules has become unworkably big. That is only one reason to adopt a quick RFC process for engineering decisions that have the potential to affect a bunch of people.

For most managers these responses should come naturally, but still good to reflect on how to deal positively with employees giving notice.

We do our own flavor of attachment parenting and this is still one of my favorite pieces about motherhood.