The Engineering Enablement podcast has been good to listen to—if a bit anodyne. The recent episode I listened to with Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s massively popular but failed org structure was really fun and useful.
Month: January 2023
Leadership abhors a vacuum.
Complaining is easy. Learning how your organization works as described here by Cindy Sridharan is hard. Which of the two do you prefer to do?
- The mirage of aspiration
- Know how your org works
- Soft skills are hard skills
- Understand implicit hierarchies
- Cultures: top-down, bottom-up and both
- Get comfortable with the ‘mess’
- Look for small (and any) wins
- Understand org constraints and manage your expectations
“Get comfortable with the ‘mess'” and I can let you in on a small secret: everything is a mess.
I love this quirky website, The Kool-aid Factory and its dynamic publications about company culture and coordination.
An article by Victor Rentea that offers a mature and pragmatic perspective on clean architectures where developers too often tend to over-abstract.
I usually say: “Premature abstraction is the root of all evil.”
https://victorrentea.ro/blog/overengineering-in-onion-hexagonal-architectures/
A great and opinionated list of what healthy teams do by Hà Phan:
- design how they work together
- have good research habits
- build to learn
- ship regularly
- build systems over features
- are inclusive
https://hpdailyrant.medium.com/what-a-healthy-team-looks-like-637e63e30edb
“This may surprise you, but continuous deployment is far and away the easiest way to write, ship, and run code in production. This is the counterintuitive truth about software: making lots of little changes swiftly is infinitely easier than making a few bulky changes slowly.”
Maybe this is counterintuitive, but ask yourself: Who has the time to manually test and release changes to production at scale? That’s right: nobody.
There is a belief in software that making something work is such deep magic or so complicated, that you should be happy with anything.
It’s not true. It has been possible for a while now to develop (any) software linearly, rationally, predictably.
The reason it persists is because it covers for a lack of competence and helps to abdicate responsibility.
A thorough treatment in the New Yorker of the way the Indian film industry is being captured by ideology.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/when-the-hindu-right-came-for-bollywood
Why am I not surprised that somebody like Marc Andreessen would be a NIMBY while at the same time being a hypocrite?