Manage Your Priorities And Energy
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will reflect on his shift from a 'company, team, self' framework to an eventual ‘quid pro quo' approach during his management tenure at Uber. His ‘quid pro quo' approach is: (1) Generally, prioritize company and team priorities over your own. (2) If you are getting de-energized, artificially prioritize some energizing work. Increase the quantity until equilibrium is restored. (3) If the long-term balance between energy and proper priorities can’t be balanced for more than a year, stop everything else and work on solving this issue e.g. change your role or quit. Will emphasizes the importance of remaining flexible and curious.featured in #436
A Strategic Approach To Replacing Data Historians
- Jason Myers tl;dr: Transitioning from legacy data historians to modern technologies in IoT / OT stacks can be achieved strategically. This involves automating manual processes, managing changes in legacy technology, and considering new tools during equipment upgrades and operational growth. Start small, scale sensibly.featured in #436
Building And Operating A Pretty Big Storage System Called S3
- Werner Vogels tl;dr: A repost of an article by Andy Warfield, VP of S3, reflects on the vast complexity and operational scale of Amazon's storage software system. Andy discusses the significance of recognizing and mitigating organizational scaling issues, similar to optimizing systems. He also discusses management’s approach to foster team ownership for problem-solving instead of dispensing solutions has led to more engaged and successful engineering outcomes.featured in #436
featured in #436
Cultivating A Culture Of Excellence
- Mike Fisher tl;dr: The authors stress the significance of a culture of excellence in promoting product innovation and success. Empowering teams with authority and accountability, focusing on meaningful metrics rather than vanity ones, strategic hiring, nurturing team dynamics, encouraging experimentation, and setting clear objectives are vital factors in fostering exceptional results and maintaining a competitive edge.featured in #435
Making Software With 4,999 Other People
- Brandon Willett tl;dr: Brandon shares what he learned from his time at Datadog, broken into 3 sections: software, projects and people. Takeaways include: (1) Keeping the development cycle near-instantaneous with features like microservices and feature flags is both productive and enjoyable. (2) Take advantage of recency bias to solve problems right after incidents. (3) Prefer projects with small organizational scopes to avoid communication breakdowns and motivate the team.featured in #435
featured in #434
A Software Engineer's Guide To A/B Testing
- Lior Neu-ner tl;dr: This guide provides an introduction to A/B testing for software engineers. It explains the basics of A/B testing, including how to devise, implement, monitor and analyze tests, and answers common questions about A/B testing. The guide also lists conditions under which you may want to avoid A/B testing, such as lack of traffic, high implementation costs, and ethical considerations. The post concludes with a launch checklist for A/B tests.featured in #434
On Becoming A VP Of Engineering: Doing The Job
- Emily Nakashima tl;dr: “I said at the beginning of this post that the most important thing I deliver is alignment. It’s not the hardest thing I have to deliver though: that is focus.“ Emily also discusses what a VP’s day to day looks like, unlearning, compensation, giving yourself more slack time, and more.featured in #433
Briefly: The Value Of Meetings, And Some Alternatives
- Kellan Elliot-McCrea tl;dr: Shopify's meeting cost calculator stirs debate; are meetings wasted time or vital? Alternatives emerge such as Dropbox's "Core Collaboration Hours" and Frame.io's "Huddle Days", which foster spontaneous discussions, encouraging productive work and respecting individual work rhythms.featured in #433