/Career Advice

From BigCo To Startup: 20 Tips For Evaluating Early-Stage Companies & Making The Leap

tl;dr: Broken down into 3 categories. Tips for: (1) Assessing a startup’s trajectory. (2) Assessing your fit with the role and the team. (3) Assessing your startup readiness & shifting to a scrappier startup mindset.

featured in #375

A Debugging Manifesto

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia discusses the attitude and approach to take when debugging, explaining the following: (1) Inspect, don’t squash. (2) Being stuck is temporary. (3) Trust nobody and nothing. (4) It’s probably your code. (5) Don’t go it alone. (6) There’s always a reason. (7) Build your toolkit. (8) It can be an adventure.

featured in #375

What If Two Programs Did This?

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: The question “What if two programs did this?” is helpful in evaluating a feature or a design request. Combining this with “Imagine if this were possible” leads to an impressive one-two punch, explained by examples in this post.

featured in #373

Focus On High-Leverage Activities

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: Leverage is impact produced divided by time invested. To increase your leverage, ask yourself the following before any activity: (1) What if this activity was simple? (decrease time cost). (2) What if this activity was huge? (increase value). (3) What else could I be doing? (opportunity cost).

featured in #370

12 Factor App Revisited

tl;dr: "The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a methodology for building software-as-a-service applications. We cover how they have since evolved, and what we can learn from them today and how they changed the status quo of yesteryear."

featured in #369

Questions For A New Leader

- Ed Batista tl;dr: A set of questions to guide these initial conversations, relevant for a new leader in any situation: (1) What are the things you are hoping I don't change? (2) What are the things you secretly hope I do change? (3) What are the good things about this organization we should build on? (4) If you were me, what would you do first? (5) Why isn't the organization doing better? And more.

featured in #368

The World Is Run By People No Smarter Than You

tl;dr: "My overwhelming lesson from the past few weeks is that even these heroes of tech are just mortals as well who make very very dumb mistakes. And if they can make those mistakes, so can you." The author elaborates on this viewpoint amongst recent examples.

featured in #368

Get Straight To The Point

- James Stanier tl;dr: "In a world of continual context-switching and distraction, if you’re able to make it as easy as possible for others to understand what you want, what the next steps are, and whether or not you have a strong preference, then you’ll find that your interactions are far, far better." James digs into this with examples and the following framework: (1) Make it clear up front what you want. (2) Make the next steps obvious. (3) If you have a recommendation, say it up front.

featured in #364

7 Estimation Anti-Patterns

- Willem-Jan Ageling tl;dr: (1) Estimates because “we have to.” (2) Neglecting different estimation opinions. (3) One estimator to rule them all. (4) Estimating takes forever. (5) Estimates need to be “correct.” (6) Estimates are turned into commitments. (7) Others do the estimation.

featured in #364

How To Build Software like an SRE

- Brandon Willett tl;dr: "My goal here isn’t “what is 100% the most reliability-oriented way we can build things”, it’s more like “what is the 80% of reliability we can get for 20% of the effort while still enabling devs to go fast“, which gets you ultimately a system that looks pretty different. But it’s a line worth walking – if you do it well, working with production is fun, instead of miserably-safe or frighteningly-dangerous."

featured in #363