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
How Platform Teams Get Stuff Done
- Pete Hodgson tl;dr: “Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.”featured in #433
Interesting Learnings From Outages
- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: The article discusses the importance of investigating and learning from outages in the industry. It explores the different types of postmortems, including internal, customer-only, and public postmortems. The article dives into 3 case studies: (1) Adevinta experienced a significant impact due to a DNS outage, (2) GitHub experienced an outage due to a network configuration issue at their secondary site, (3) Reddit experienced an issue with a Kubernetes cluster upgrade gone wrong."featured in #432
Build Times And Developer Productivity
- Abi Noda tl;dr: The takeaway is that even modest improvements to build times are helpful. Three things: (1) There is no specific threshold for how fast builds need to be for developers to stay on task and be productive. (2) Providing developers with estimated build times can improve productivity. (3) Even modest improvements in build latency can be helpful.featured in #431
The Ultimate Guide To Developer Experience
- Ari-Pekka Koponen tl;dr: Investing in developer experience is a bit of a no-brainer if you want to improve developer retention and productivity. But what are some practical ways to drive great DX in your organization?featured in #431
Right-Sizing Your Technology Team
tl;dr: Authors provide insight into the following questions: (1) Do we have enough developers? (2) Are we paying more than we need to for our development efforts? (3) Why isn’t the software our developers are creating delivering the outcome we wanted to see? (4) Can we wind down or repurpose the number of developers maintaining some of our internal and legacy software capabilities? (5) Why is the value of our software falling?featured in #431
featured in #430
Gelling Your Engineering Leadership Team
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) Debugging the engineering leadership team after stepping into a new role. (2) Gelling your leadership into an effective team. (3) What to expect from your direct reports in that leadership team. (4) Diagnosing conflict within your team.featured in #430
Readability: Google's Temple To Engineering Excellence
- Brian Kihoon Lee tl;dr: Brian shares his experience as a readability mentor at Google and reflects on its cultural significance within the company. While he doesn't recommend implementing Google's version of readability in other companies, he proposes a variant called "Readability Lite" that focuses on consensus on readability standards, mentorship programs, and non-blocking mechanisms to encourage engineers to strive for mastery.featured in #430