Tech Reviewing for Staff Engineer.

Hello! If you’re here, then you’ve probably volunteered to be a tech reviewer on my upcoming book, Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. I’m aiming to “prerelease” the book in late January to early February on Gumroad, followed by a full release on Gumroad and Amazon in late February, and a print version in March.

Feedback appreciated by January 10th, 2020.

Questions? please contact me at lethain@gmail.com

Downloading draft

You can download the latest copy of the book here. You can see recent changes in the lethain/staff-eng commit history.

Caveats

  1. I’ve asked each reviewer to focus on an area within the text, but you’re welcome to give feedback on other sections
  2. The current cover is a temporary stub
  3. There will be an EPUB version at release, but not currently

Requested feedback

My goal in requesting your feedback is to make this a more effective book. I’m grateful for any constructive feedback that you have, even if you’re not sure what a good fix is. If your feedback is, “This section was confusing, but I’m not sure why.”, then please still give it! This isn’t a situation where feedback has to be coupled with a solution to be useful. (Although more detailed feedback is always easier to understand than less detailed.)

Kinds of errors and feedback that would be most helpful in descending order:

  1. Incorrect/inaccurate – are there portions that are factually wrong?
  2. Weak or unconvincing claims – do I make claims that you disagree with? Do I ignore critical counter-points/objections?
  3. Unclear or incoherent arguments – are there areas where the argument or claims simply don’t make sense?

I also welcome feedback on confusing sentences, grammar, typos, additional references/resources, but please don’t feel obligated to look for those sorts of things.

Delivering feedback

There are three ways to provide feedback, in preferred order:

  1. Submit a Pull Request to lethain/staff-eng. The guides are in src/markdown/guides, and the stories are in src/markdown/stories

  2. Create a Google Doc, share it with me, and add comments there.

  3. Join TechWriters Discord and provide feedback in #book-staffeng

  4. Submit this Airtable form

  5. Email me directly at lethain@gmail.com with your notes

Altogether, I’m grateful for your feedback however you give it.

Acknowledgements

If you share your preferred name and link (twitter, website, etc), the I would love to acknowledge your help reviewing in an acknowledgment page within the final version of the book.

Thank you!

Thank you for being willing to assist, and please let me know how I can return the favor.

Will