/Management

Shipping Spotify’s Culture: 5 Plugins (And 4 Principles) For Supercharging Developer Experience At Scale

- Tyson Singer tl;dr: 4 principles are DevEx at scale: (1) Keep squads fast by keeping them small, capable, and aligned. (2) Make engineering excellence and quality an everyday practice. (3) The best solutions come from the bottom up, so empower the teams doing the work. (4) Our fellow developers are our customers, so build with empathy.

featured in #376

Building Secure, Compliant Containers

- Elliot Volkman tl;dr: Containers are ideal for cloud-first organizations. However, as their use has grown, so have security incidents in container environments. Learn how to build secure containers that support business objectives.

featured in #376

Incident Categories I’d Like To See

- Lorin Hochstein tl;dr: If you’re categorizing your incidents by cause, here are some options for causes that I’d love to see used. These are all taken directly from the field of cognitive systems engineering research: (1) Production pressure. (2) Goal conflicts. (3) Workarounds. (4) Automation surprises.

featured in #376

Visual Workflow Automation. Now With Code

tl;dr: Build powerful automations fast, with all the hackability you’d expect as a developer. Stop provisioning infrastructure and maintaining one-off scripts. Build and automate cron jobs, custom alerts, and ETL tasks 10x faster with Retool Workflows.

featured in #375

Writing Docs Well: Why Should A Software Engineer Care?

- Lorin Hochstein tl;dr: Lorin recently gave a lecture in a graduate software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. There are 3 goals when writing: (1) Building shared understanding. (2) A tool for your own thinking. (3) Influence in a larger org when you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy. Lorin also advises on how to improve technical writing. 

featured in #374

How To Measure The Impact Of Your Data Team

- Tejas Manohar tl;dr: At your company, how do you measure the success of your data team? If you can’t provide hard-and-fast answers, don’t worry–you’re far from alone. Learn why you should stop focusing on metrics and why you should start tracking outcomes to measure the impact of your data team.

featured in #374

Removing Uncertainty: The Tip Of The Iceberg

- James Stanier tl;dr: "You reduce uncertainty until the software exists. You reduce uncertainty by doing: prototyping, designing, writing code, and shipping. Each of these actions serve to reduce the uncertainty about what is left to build." James discusses different methods of reducing uncertainty across a project, at various stages.

featured in #373

Company, Team, Self

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses his experiences managing and energizing teams. "Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct like mine that prioritized the company and team first, will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress. It’s not only reasonable to violate correct priorities to energize yourself and your team, modestly violating priorities to energize your team enroute to a broader goal is an open leadership secret."

featured in #372

Debugging Teams: Groundhog Day

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: "Have you ever been on a team that seemed to work very hard but never move forward? Where you look back quarter after quarter, or perhaps year after year, and you did a lot, but nothing actually seemed to happen? Congratulations, you’re in the middle of Groundhog Day." Camille discusses the symptoms of Groundhog Day and how to get out of it. 

featured in #372

Investing In Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide For Startups

- David Nunez tl;dr: Nunez outlines specific steps for creating a culture of good internal documentation hygiene. "Pulling from his own playbooks as Uber’s first dedicated docs hire and the first-ever Head of Docs Content for Stripe, he shares ultra-tactical advice for each part of the process: from building the habit and incentivizing engineers to make the effort, to keeping things organized."

featured in #371