Building Your Executive Network
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will outlines several tactic for engineers to do this. “Your network is a collection of relationships, and relationships always work best when they’re built before you need them. Set a small goal, like meeting one new person each month, and slowly build your network up over time. Don’t make it your top priority, but don’t forget it either.”featured in #394
Move Past Incident Response To Reliability
tl;dr: In this guide you will learn: (1) About the current standard for incident response and analysis. (2) Where some teams get themselves in trouble with the current standard. (3) How to find your own path through the innovation and dogma of leading a company’s approach to reliability.featured in #394
featured in #393
Reducing IT Costs With Observability
tl;dr: Learn about the top five ways engineering leaders can use monitoring and observability solutions to reduce, control, and optimize costs.featured in #393
Removing Uncertainty: The Tip Of The Iceberg
- James Stanier tl;dr: “When you’re staring a huge, challenging project in the face, don’t align your team around just getting it done. Instead, align your team around continually reducing uncertainty…” James advises us to prioritize the most uncertain parts of the project and focus efforts on getting answers. Answers fall into two broad categories: that it is possible, as proved by code, or that it’s not possible, but yields another avenue to try. You repeat this process until you’re done, or until you think it’s best to stop. “Focussing on reducing uncertainty builds momentum and trust both inside and outside of the team.”featured in #392
featured in #391
How We Manage Incident Response At Honeycomb
- Fred Herbert tl;dr: This article is broken down into five sections that provide a coherent view of incident response: (1) Dealing with the unknown. (2) Managing limited cognitive bandwidth. (3) Coordination patterns. (4) Maintaining psychological safety. (5) Feeding information back into the organization.featured in #391
Build Internal Tools, Remarkably Fast
tl;dr: Build business software 10x faster with Retool. Companies like Amazon and DoorDash use Retool to build apps and workflows that help teams work faster. Retool is free for teams of up to 5, and startups can get $25,000 in free credits for paid plans.featured in #391
featured in #390
Writing An Engineering Strategy
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) An example of an engineering strategy. (2) Richard Rumelt’s definition of strategy: diagnosis, guiding policies, and coherent actions. (3) How and when to write your engineering strategy. (4) Dealing with undocumented strategies in other functions. (5) Structuring your guiding policies around resource allocation, fundamental rules, how decision are made. (6) Maintaining the right altitude in your strategy by ensuring guiding principles are applicable, enforced, and create leverage. (7) The most common kinds of coherent actions in engineering strategies. (8) Whether strategy should be executive-lead.featured in #389