/Management

The Seven Areas Of Software Management

- Ian Nowland tl;dr: (1) Engineering: How are things being built? (2) Execution: How are things getting built on time and within budget? (3) Operations: Is the built thing going to keep running? (4) People: Are people motivated taking part in what is being built? (5) Product: Are customers satisfied by what is being built? (6) Partners: Do all my partners understand and agree with all the above? (7) Company: How do I get the company to align with all these answers?

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Agility ≠ Speed

- Kevlin Henney tl;dr: Agile is not achieving a sustainable speed in an optimal direction; "it is being able to change both speed and direction, and to do so easily. It is the second derivative of position with respect to time, not just the first: agility relates both to velocity and to the ability to change it, revising direction and pace as circumstances demand."

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5 Tips for Evaluating SOC 2 Security Monitoring Platforms

tl;dr: If you're needing to get SOC 2 certified, you're likely looking for the fastest and easiest platform to get it done. Let's be honest, it isn't fun (and usually not fast or easy either). It helps to know what to look for in a security monitoring platform so that you can avoid any unexpected hiccups. Here are the top 5 things to pay attention to in your evaluation process.

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The CTO Journey: Mark Porter Of MongoDB

- Mark Porter tl;dr: Q&A, including what traits, skills, and habits should an engineering team focus on: (1) Conway's Law: make sure your org and code are structured to represent the product you want to delight customers with. (2) Dunbar's Law: humans can maintain a certain number of social connections, so keep teams & interactions within this number. (3) Have small groups where they know what they’re doing, are allowed to make decisions about it, and have a connection to the customer.

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Good Efforts Preserve Bad Systems

- Milosz Danczak tl;dr: "Incentives are never perfect because management always has a limited understanding of the system it manages." Therefore, unrewarded work is often carried out to keep the system in place. However, Milosz argues, this results in management avoiding or ignoring issues and, in order, for change to happen, we must be open to failure on a personal level and culturally, as a company, for these issues to be tackled. 

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Borrowing Lines From Great Leaders Around You

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: "It’s a lot harder to notice the magic of particular phrases or approaches when you see someone do it." Lara suggest developing this skill by noticing how other leaders speak. What do they say? How do they say it? Watch how they change the direction of the conversation, pause the conversation, decrease tension, create clarity, push back, etc... Lara suggests sitting in on meetings you normally wouldn't e.g. product or sales to pinpoint 3 new techniques or phrases that you can then start experimenting with.

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Management Basics: Determining A Performance Rating

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: The first major input in any kind of fair evaluation is based on the work the employee needed to accomplish, and the work they did accomplish. Camille breaks this down into "must be achieved, stretch goals, and moonshot goals" elaborating on each. She also discusses identifying management characteristics essential to the role so you can score the candidate against each, while also giving leeway for your own judgement.

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Cloudflare Workers: The Fastest Serverless Platform (Eliminate Cold Starts)

- Rita Kozlov tl;dr: Just about four years ago, we announced Cloudflare Workers, a serverless platform that runs directly on the edge. Today, Workers is 30% faster than it was three years ago at P90. And it is 210% faster than Lambda@Edge, and 298% faster than Lambda.

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Hiring (And Retaining) A Diverse Engineering Team

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "Stories from 6 engineering leaders who succeeded in building and growing diverse teams," with the following key takeaways: (1) Underrepresented leaders make a difference. (2) There are tactical wins you can start now e.g. bias training, partnering with organizations. (3) Use structure to drive diversity outcomes & create processes around those outcomes. (4) Tactics need a defined strategy and goals.

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Scaling Productivity On Microservices At Lyft (Part 2): Optimizing For Fast Local Development

- Scott Wilson tl;dr: "We set out to make a simple and fast inner dev loop. The core shift that needed to be made was from the fully integrated environment of Onebox (many services), toward an isolated environment where only one service and its tests would run. This new isolated environment would be run on developer laptops. Users simply edit code and run tests with no additional steps in between." 

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