I’m not sure whether this will make any sales at all but Turkish Clubhouse made me brush up on my language and I loaded some old vocabulary I had lying around into an Anki deck and workflow. I thought I’d might as well productize it since high quality Anki decks for advanced learners are hard to find.
Lots of teams try to dogmatically implement scrum without looking at their team and goals. There are lots of alternative ways of doing things most of which will be more agile, not less.
It has been a while coming that for most workloads sqlite is more than good enough and at the same time also has a lot of operational benefits to offer. I never could believe all the hoops you have to jump through to get a postgres/mysql to run.
“People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,”
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/triple-peak-day-work-from-home/629457/
Lots of people default to meetings for everything they want to get done which leads to the negative effects listed in the article but is also a severe indictment of their competence and flexibility.
That’s nothing short of an amazing list of time management techniques geared specifically towards helping engineers achieve maximum impact.
- Defend your time
- Pay yourself first
- Defend others’ time
- Clearly designate interrupt-driven work
- Clearly designate low-leverage work
- Communicate with candor
- Prioritize ruthlessly
Become good at these and there are no limits to what you can achieve.
https://github.com/readme/guides/time-management-software-engineers
Lots of examples here by Intercom about how to enable teams to ship as fast as possible and at the same time also as safely as possible.
- Be available after shipping
- Ship instrumentation first
- Use feature flags
- Ship to a small subset of traffic
- Ship the “read” path first
- Document and share your plan and actions
https://www.intercom.com/blog/ship-fast-safe-learn-from-production/
Lots of good bits about learning to write in this despite the weird formatting in Substack.
https://sahilbloom.substack.com/p/the-power-business-writing-guide?s=r
Momentum definitely is magic and I’d add that you get it by focusing on tempo.
“Declaring a feature that’s in customers’ hands “done,” without monitoring, or with flaky tests, or tons of highly redundant code, or other obvious pending work, doesn’t magically get that work done. That work will always be there. It’ll just show up as surprises in your Maintenance Roadmap at an unknown date, when your team has mentally moved on and stopped thinking about the feature.”
Finish things, do them properly. Make problems go away.
I totally agree with Dan Luu that the willingness to look stupid brings with it more benefits than can be counted.
Lots of hours put in over the past year to achieve this and the only thing it means is that I get to put lots more hours in. Let’s go!
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/choco-unicorn-food-waste-supply-chain/amp/?guccounter=1