/Management

The Scoop: Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely covers a timeline of events, cause of the outage, what customers are saying, the impact of the outage on Atlassian’s business, learnings from this outage, and more. 

featured in #308

Dimensions Of Power

- Kent Beck tl;dr: At Kent's company Gusto, the engineering team switched from private to public engineering levels and, as part of the transition, Kent wanted to emphasize to senior engineers and managers that power should not be misused. Here is Kent's ways in which to exercise "power advantages" & experience power disadvantages.

featured in #307

The Scoop: Inside Fast’s Rapid Collapse

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "I am covering details from the vantage point of software engineers and engineering managers." Gergely covers how Fast able to hire engineers competing with the big tech companies, warning signs within the company as seen from an engineering perspective, the current situation within the company, and more.

featured in #307

How To Speed Up ClickHouse Queries Using Materialized Columns

- Karl-Aksel Puulmann tl;dr: ClickHouse supports speeding up queries using materialized columns to create new columns on the fly from existing data. In this post, I’ll walk through a query optimization example that's well-suited to this rarely-used feature.

featured in #307

Agile And The Long Crisis Of Software

- Miriam Posner tl;dr: "Recently, though, some signs are emerging that Agile’s power may be fading. A new moment of reckoning is in the making, one that may end up knocking Agile off its perch." Miriam discusses the negative impact and aspects of agile development on eng teams. 

featured in #307

Help Your Teammates Navigate Moments Of Self-Doubt 

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: "If you have a teammate coming to you questioning their worth and effectiveness, I want to equip you with a framework that will help this teammate recognize their successes and impact." Lara discusses the BICEPS framework that covers: Improvement, Choice, Equality / Fairness, Predictability and Significance. As well as some questions you can ask your teammate e.g. In the last year, where have you created more clarity or predictability for people?

featured in #306

6 Ways Staff Engineers Help Reach Clarity

- Alex Ewerlöf tl;dr: "One of the things that I catch myself doing more and more as a staff engineer is to help individuals, teams or sometimes the organization reach clarity. I’m no oracle and this is not rocket science but in this article I’d like to go meta and clarify the process of reaching clarity with some examples."

featured in #306

Introducing Machine ID

- Ev Kontsevoy tl;dr: Big release from Teleport this week. Teleport 9 now includes Machine ID, an easy way to secure machine-to-machine communications based on X.509 and SSH certificates.

featured in #306

Self-direction: Navigating Agency And Responsibility

- Raphael Poss tl;dr: "After reaching a certain level of seniority, it’s expected that a worker can self-direct in service of the organizational goals. This creates a situation that can be difficult to navigage: is it really self-direction if the organization decides what are the “right” and “wrong” choices in the end?"

featured in #306

How I Think About Code Management

- Andreas Klinger tl;dr: Split code management into 2 tasks: Reducing complexity & increasing confidence. (1) Reducing complexity so you have fewer parts and interconnections between them. Develop "concepts with better boundaries." (2) Increase confidence by streamlining. Minimize ways things can be done, make them obvious and make sure they work. Andreas explains light-weight processes to do both. 

featured in #305