You can't reason about big balls of mud.
May 23, 2018 Big balls of mud appear to have properties, but they don't. Throw it all away? It's not so dire. You can extend large property-less systems. It's a matter of switching from abstract to empirical reasoning.
Consider the team you have for senior positions.
May 19, 2018 I've been hiring engineering manager of managers roles over the past six months. These roles are scarcer than line management roles, and vary more across companies. This process has taught me a bunch of new things, and been remarkably rewarding.
Setting organizational direction.
May 9, 2018 Over the past year, as I've transitioned into largely working with managers of managers, and it's gotten much more challenging to define direction for the growing organization. Let's explore that a bit.
Model, document and share.
April 26, 2018 One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority, and I've written about one of the styles that I've found surprisingly effective in those conditions. I call it Model, Document, and Share.
Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt.
April 15, 2018 Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This post takes a look at why migrations are so important, and also how to run them effectively.