StaffEng Updates, June 2020

I’m on parental leave for four weeks (after which Laurel and I are siwtching off, she’ll be taking a bit and then I’ll be taking more later when she returns to work), and in addition to learning how to change diapers, read hunger cues, exist in a world of constant sleep deprivation, and starting to educate myself on systemtic racism, I also wanted to push forward a couple of lingering projects, one of which was StaffEng.

What’s changed:

• staffeng.com is now a Gatsby site served as a Github Page, rather than as a Python server hosted on a Google Cloud Function. It’s more robust, faster and will be easier to maintain
• lethain/staff-eng repository on Github is now a public repository, and it’s possible for folks to submit their own stories as a pull request instead of the previous Google Doc process. This also means you can submit fixes if you’re annoyed about the usability and such (e.g. I can’t seem to make it work properly on some iPad sizes to save my life)
• StaffEng has a “Guides” section, which is roughly an outline of the resources I’d like to write over some extended timeframe and perhaps eventually collect into a book in addition to keeping them free on StaffEng itself

What hasn’t changed:

• Love to add more stories from folks about their experience of reaching Staff-plus engineering roles, especially folks who are BIPOC and women who often have a fraught path to reaching and operating in such roles
• Believe providing a set of honest stories will help industry recognize our work to do here in terms of making this sorts of roles available in an equitable way
• Believe providing oppionated guides on what’s important in Staff-plus roles remains an effective means to steer the industry towards both inclusion and better decision making in general

Hopefully I’ll be able to get at least a few more stories up now that this bookkeeping is complete, as well as more writing to synthesize the learnings!