We’ve worked remotely like this ten years ago with Hubbub and had to come up with a lot of these tactics and tricks just to be able to get work done. In the meantime, it seems the tools have come a long way (imagine the things we could have done if we had a tool like this back then!) but people’s thinking is still stuck in the past.
An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?
One of the things I have to fight the most for and that I think is what allows me to work well: “Regularly get in your team’s shoes”. Call it Genba, or Fingerspitzengefühl but the most important thing is to stay in touch with your team’s day to day reality.
“I see operationally-minded engineers working cross-functionally with software development teams to help them grow in a few key areas: making outsourcing successful, speeding up time to value, and up-leveling their production chops.”
A lot of the stuff here is our common sense when running projects and also our unique problem as a platform team trying to get stuff done with/for other teams. One thing that engineers tend to forget is how much agency they have: “Although you can’t control what other teams can do, you can influence them.”
A couple of years ago I learned Haskell and to do that I read a book that is universally recommended for beginners and used to be available free online called “Learn you a Haskell for Great Good”.
The construction site next to our house is still spewing forth noise and fumes at all hours. The city is unable to do anything here it seems and calling the people at the construction site we are met with nothing but deflection and lies.
I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.
An amazing article about COBOL and how deep our investment is in legacy technologies that work really well but are also a dead-end. It also seems that if you know any one of those technologies you can find work up until the moment that you die.
The long rumored link between Turkish and Japanese is getting some validation. I’m now also looking into learning Japanese (Chinese wasn’t really doing it for me).
A list of learnings from writing a production database by Mahesh Balakrishnan that can easily be applied to any other part of software engineering as well but of course not one-to-one, like: “Socialize estimates of task difficulty repeatedly”
A field report from doing incident management by John Allspaw that I can very much relate to with lots of learnings that need to be disseminated: “Focus less on incident metrics and more on signals that people are learning”
One of the biggest limiting factors for people working in technology is that they like to forget that everything around them is a socio-technical system. The world just isn’t that simple.
The construction site that surrounds our house has started a bunch of space heaters this week. The devices had been there for a while but only started being annoying now that they’re turned on. These things run day and night, they make a ridiculous amount of noise (some 60 dB at our window) and because they burns diesel oil they also pollute and stink up the entire courtyard.
I was amazed at how closely this article about product development at Facebook tracks with how I approach it: “PMs are 100% accountable for the results of your team.”
Any chance I get I also dispense with Pull Requests because I like my projects and teams to be happy and productive and blazingly fast. From my experience both approaches are about equally safe and with proper guidance you don’t even need a team of only seniors to make it work.
The Pulp game editor is hugely impressive and at the same time making something like this is well within the potential of any small talented group of people who have a bit of time and vision.
Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.
I often get surprised reactions when I say that we don’t do Scrum. After reading about how other technology companies run their projects, it seems that Scrum—which is wasteful and does not fit reality—is on the way out.
A quick overview of the importance of communication in software engineering, some guidelines and the many work situations where you will be able to apply this particular skill.
I keep referring back to this distinction which though coarse remains extremely useful. The barrel-like qualities of Understand, Ideate, Take Initiative, Recruit Others, Deliver Results can definitely be nurtured in people.
Of course it still makes sense to defend yourself, but if you have any idea how software functions, it should be obvious that the number of known and unknown vulnerabilities in our devices number in the thousands and a lot of them are and remain exploited by all kinds of organizations.
I’ve had a number of amazing and unforgettable experiences with Couchsurfing mostly staying in Berlin way back in the day. This history of the site’s rise and fall fills in what happened after I lost track.
If you are looking around during the great resignation, I can tell you that things like 4-day work weeks, mission driven companies and excellent colleagues are out there to be found. For instance where I’m working now.
We’re picking up some of these large scale iOS development practices ourselves. Getting rid of those pesky conflicts in pbxproj files alone would be more than worth it.
I’m not a huge fan of the financial metaphor for tech debt but this pries apart the core of the problem well from an optionality lens (or as you could also say “rich moves”).
Hanging out on Clubhouse from the beginning made me realize how lacking my Turkish was. I got on the app when Germany came online and I think Turkey launched shortly after that and only then did it kick off in the Netherlands.
Traditional operations teams and their counterparts in product development thus often end up in conflict, most visibly over how quickly software can be released to production. At their core, the development teams want to launch new features and see them adopted by users. At their core, the ops teams want to make sure the service doesn’t break while they are holding the pager. Because most outages are caused by some kind of change—a new configuration, a new feature launch, or a new type of user traffic—the two teams’ goals are fundamentally in tension.
One, they must build psychological safety to spur learning and avoid preventable failures; two, they must set high standards and inspire and enable people to reach them.
Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. So that means somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics.
A good counter-point by Camille Fournier about how being a hands-off manager can turn into being an absent manager. Making sure these kind of meetings are held is the most important leverage you have as senior leadership.
‘Whomsoever is possessed of magisterial strength is courted; while whomsoever has inferior strength pays court to others. It is for this reason that the shrewd ruler strives for might.’
Enter prebuilds: pools of codespaces, fully cloned and bootstrapped, waiting to be connected with a developer who wants to get to work. The engineering investment we’ve made in prebuilds has returned its value many times over: we can now create reliable, preconfigured codespaces, primed and ready for GitHub.com development in 10 seconds.
I need to keep track of how our bet on AWS AppSync is doing which is so small that it doesn’t show up in Stack Overflow’s official tags chart but here’s an off-label website that will give it to us.
It’s a bit counterintuitive but I think it’s a good point that all the efforts to more and better coordination are harmful. We should have less coordination which will inevitably lead to more work between teams, but that is work you should be doing anyway. I think teams are in general very heavily underfacilitated.
An extremely damning account of the way Vice and also the NYT have treated Naomi Wu with some choice bad behaviour from people like Doctorow in part 2 as well.
I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.