Month: January 2023

Ilya Grigorik notes down a perspective on what people at the higher senior+ levels should be doing. At that level things can get fuzzy and people tend to struggle.

  • It’s not your job to solve the problem
  • Focus on perspectives
  • Build technical leaders

Scroll down especially to read the excellent list of tactical everyday best tips.

https://ilya.grigorik.com/the-principal-engineers-handbook/

Despite not being the biggest fan of Shape Up or of 37s, I still really enjoyed watching this video by Ryan Singer about Shaping.

It’s very well done and though I wouldn’t recommend anybody to follow this by the book, you would do well to take inspiration from it.

Just to file this for my receipts here. Marina Weisband asks whether you would build a website for a small organization using Wix.

Look at the replies all of which are somewhere between: “Datenschutz this”, “you can get sued for that”, “be afraid”, “don’t do it”. It’s so incredibly sad that the people in Germany created this absurd swamp where the best answer for most people is to just opt out of the internet.

And then at the same time these people will gaslight me by saying that “Datenschutz isn’t the problem”. Of course Datenschutz isn’t the problem. The problem are the infinite number of true idiots in this country who will talk about nothing other than Datenschutz.

To refocus on being available and being able to do deep work as a leader of an org I’m employing a bunch of the things listed.

  • A clear calendar without superfluous meetings or vacuous rituals for me and my team
  • Invest time to connect and work on the topics that are truly important
  • Pull tasks for the day from Things to a piece of paper
  • Prepare and minute meetings in an auto-filled daily note in my note taking system
  • Block out most e-mail and slack
  • Cancel meetings or counter them to 15 minutes (or just walk up to my desk)
  • Set the standards and then delegate things which others should be better at than me anyway
  • Proactively cancel tasks that are not seeing progress

There’s no point for me to be busy. Work will find me anyway. I better be available for the important stuff.

View at Medium.com

The past couple of weeks I had a bit of a weird feeling because there weren’t any new episodes from Piratensender Powerplay. Then I found out Friedemann is out sick but also that they have a Patreon with extra episodes.

I immediately reallocated some pledges and am now supporting them. This is one of the best German podcasts and at times its level is up there with the top US podcasts I’ve listened to. Coming from me this is absurdly high praise.

Give it a listen:

https://www.patreon.com/piratensenderpowerplay/about

Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.

The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.

https://digitalservice.bund.de/blog/mit-kommunikationsdesign-nutzerzentrierte-verwaltungsmodernisierung-unterstuetzen