DevEx Principles: Minimize Switching Contexts
- Kathy Korevec tl;dr: Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I've learned a lot about what developers need to succeed: (1) Minimize switching contexts. (2) Remember, you are a chef cooking for chefs: Respect the craft. (3) Automate anything that can be automated. (4) Optimize for time to code. (5) Be mindful of breaking changes. People’s services depend on your services. (6) Don’t bury the lede.featured in #389
Real-world Engineering Challenges #8: Breaking Up A Monolith
- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "We’re diving into a massive migration project by Khan Academy, involving moving one million lines of Python code and splitting them across more than 40 services, mostly in Go, as part of a migration that took 3.5 years and involved around 100 software engineers."featured in #388
featured in #388
Async Standup Reports For Fewer Status Meetings
tl;dr: Automated team progress updates via Slack or any chat you use. Make sure less time is spent on meetings and more on building.featured in #388
Uptime, Status Pages, And Transparency Calculus
tl;dr: "It is a real-world example of Goodhart’s Law, in that as soon as we began using uptime as a target, it stopped being a useful measure. So what is an ideal alternative? For me, as a naive engineer, I’d love to see the industry start viewing clear and transparent communication in past incidents as positive signal about a working relationship. After all, we know incidents are a fact of life, and it’s much better to be honest about them than hide."featured in #387
Setting Engineering Org Values
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses the following questions and the values he's found most effective: "What kinds of problems do values solve? Should engineering orgs have values at all? When does it make sense to establish values out? What makes values useful? How are engineering values distinct from a technology strategy? How should you roll out values?"featured in #386
What's Identity-Native Infrastructure Access?
tl;dr: Unlock all Teleport Connect sessions to learn about infrastructure access from DoorDash, Dropbox, Discord, Vonage, and others when you RSVP for the Feb 9th event.featured in #386
30-60 Days In A New Leadership Role: Run Experiments For Change
- Lara Hogan tl;dr: "We’re intentionally limiting this process to two experiments because tons of change at once will be scary and confusing for folks. We’re also going to limit the experiment timeline to 2-3 weeks; the goal is to be able to gather data at the end of your first 60 days in your new leadership role." After crafting experiments, develop your communication plan, implement your experiments and prepare to share the results.featured in #385
How We Found Our Ideal Customer Profile
- James Hawkins tl;dr: "Creating an Ideal Customer Profile is one of the most important things we've ever done." James shows how this is reflected in the companies revenue. It enabled the company to make important decisions - they were better placed to describe what the company does, what the site looks and feels like, pricing model, and more. James also describes how the company approached creating this profile.featured in #385
A Framework For Prioritizing Tech Debt
- Max Countryman tl;dr: "Now with a complete list of your tech debt as it stands go through each and answer the following questions: (1) If we choose to do nothing, will this issue become worse, remain the same, or improve? (2) If it'll become worse, how quickly will it degrade? (3) If it remains the same, how much disruption is it causing today? (4) If it'll improve, at what point will it improve to the degree it's no longer an obstruction?"featured in #384