/Leadership

Inside Uber’s Move To The Cloud: Part 1

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely covers: (1) The history of Uber’s data centers. (2) Challenges of operating your own data centers - hard drives, ODM woes, and the automation of data center maintenance. (3) Incentives and pull factors from Covid-19, the Postmates acquisition, and CapEx and OpEx costs. (4) Cloud basics. A primer on data centers, regions, and availability zones. What these mean for public Cloud providers and businesses like Uber.

featured in #396

Running Your Engineering Onboarding Program

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) Fundamental components of onboarding, including examples. (2) Role of executive sponsor, orchestrator, manager and buddy in a typical process. (3) Curriculum to consider including in your onboarding. (4) Why onboarding programs fail. (5) Whether to integrate with wider company onboarding. (6) When to prioritize onboarding.

featured in #395

Why You Should Send A Weekly Summary Email

- Jens-Fabian Goetzmann tl;dr: The weekly email has 2 headings, with 3–5 short bullets under each: (1) “Achievements This Week” i.e. the most important things you’ve done this week. (2) “Priorities Next Week:” the most important things you want to get done the following. The benefits are: it starts the week off right, ensure progress on the things that matter, enables introspection, aligns priorities, make invisible work visible and keep a record of achievements.

featured in #395

Building Your Executive Network

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will outlines several tactic for engineers to do this. “Your network is a collection of relationships, and relationships always work best when they’re built before you need them. Set a small goal, like meeting one new person each month, and slowly build your network up over time. Don’t make it your top priority, but don’t forget it either.”

featured in #394

Move Past Incident Response To Reliability

tl;dr: In this guide you will learn: (1) About the current standard for incident response and analysis. (2) Where some teams get themselves in trouble with the current standard. (3) How to find your own path through the innovation and dogma of leading a company’s approach to reliability.

featured in #394

Let It Fail

- Max Countryman tl;dr: Max discusses the implications of letting things go sideways, as opposed to stepping in and creating a short-term fix, and the longer term positive impact this strategy can have on the business as a whole. “It represented an important learning opportunity for the broader business which would generate broader buy in and allow us to dramatically improve process.”

featured in #393

Reducing IT Costs With Observability

tl;dr: Learn about the top five ways engineering leaders can use monitoring and observability solutions to reduce, control, and optimize costs.

featured in #393

Removing Uncertainty: The Tip Of The Iceberg

- James Stanier tl;dr:  “When you’re staring a huge, challenging project in the face, don’t align your team around just getting it done. Instead, align your team around continually reducing uncertainty…” James advises us to prioritize the most uncertain parts of the project and focus efforts on getting answers. Answers fall into two broad categories: that it is possible, as proved by code, or that it’s not possible, but yields another avenue to try. You repeat this process until you’re done, or until you think it’s best to stop. “Focussing on reducing uncertainty builds momentum and trust both inside and outside of the team.”

featured in #392

Retrospectives Antipatterns

- Aino Corry tl;dr: If you use retrospectives, or any kind of meeting where people are supposed to discuss and learn from their discussions, you will have experienced less efficient sessions from time to time. There is no wonder in that, and it happens to most people. This article offers solutions to three common, unfortunate situations: (1) Skipping generating insights. (2) Getting lost in things you can't change. (3) Being dominated by a loudmouth.

featured in #391

How We Manage Incident Response At Honeycomb

- Fred Hebert tl;dr: This article is broken down into five sections that provide a coherent view of incident response: (1) Dealing with the unknown. (2) Managing limited cognitive bandwidth. (3) Coordination patterns. (4) Maintaining psychological safety. (5) Feeding information back into the organization.

featured in #391