An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Eng Management.
January 22, 2019 I wrote a book, An Elegant Puzzle, which will be available in late May, 2019. This is something I've been working on over the past year, and which I'm extraordinarily excited to share!
Newsletter for Irrational Exuberance.
January 20, 2019 I'm a long-time believer in RSS, but I also realize that RSS support is far worse today than it was a decade ago, and have spent some time putting together a weekly newsletter of my posts for folks who'd like to follow my writing in a different way.
Metrics for the unmeasurable.
January 19, 2019 As organizations grow more complex, the folks running them interface with reality through increasingly incorporeal abstractions. On the smallest teams, leadership might be deep in the code on a daily basis. A bit larger, and you're talking about tasks in sprints. Larger still, and you're talking about collections of tasks, and adopting fancy terminology like 'epics.' At a hundred plus engineers, you're likely talking primarily in themes of work with focus on several key initiatives. Next, you might be talking about the investment frameworks for making prioritization decisions.
Some delightful developer experiences in 2019.
January 7, 2019 I once worked at a company that built most of their functionality on top of Facebook's advertising APIs. GraphQL was not publically a thing at that point, but the API design was more or less equivalent to GraphQL. Properties would appear and disappear without warning, and reacting to changes required frequent fire drills.
Good process is evolved, not designed.
January 1, 2019 Time management is an ongoing challenge for managers: so much to do, so little time. The early-career manager, learning to balance being pulled in so many directions, is a sympathetic figure. Empathy for senior managers, dashing between back-to-back meetings and five minutes late to each, can be hader to summon.