/Leadership

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featured in #391

Against Overwhelm

- Paulo André tl;dr: “Throughout my entire engineering management career, what percentage of the time did I spend in a state of overwhelm?” Paolo provides the tools to prevent you to become intentional with how you spend your time and energy: (1) Clarify what goals, and how they align with your team and company, so you have a framework to decide how to not spend your time. (2) Use the Energy Audit to create visibility on where your time, attention and energy are going. (3) Given your goals, focus on leverage instead of productivity. Use the modified Eisenhower Matrix to define what’s truly important and a multiplier of your input. (4) With all of the above, design your ideal week and overlay each actual week on top of it. Push yourself to reduce the gap, and use the two as a means to reflect and improve weekly. (5) Whatever you do, focus on that thing only.

featured in #390

Writing An Engineering Strategy

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) An example of an engineering strategy. (2) Richard Rumelt’s definition of strategy: diagnosis, guiding policies, and coherent actions. (3) How and when to write your engineering strategy. (4) Dealing with undocumented strategies in other functions. (5) Structuring your guiding policies around resource allocation, fundamental rules, how decision are made. (6) Maintaining the right altitude in your strategy by ensuring guiding principles are applicable, enforced, and create leverage. (7) The most common kinds of coherent actions in engineering strategies. (8) Whether strategy should be executive-lead.

featured in #389

Saving Millions On Logging: Finding Relevant Savings

- Rich Marscher tl;dr: "At HubSpot, our relatively new Backend Performance team is tasked with improving the runtime and cost performance of our backend software. In this two-part blog series, we will look at a structured method we use for approaching cost savings work and demonstrating how we apply it at HubSpot to save millions on the storage costs of our application logs.”

featured in #389

DevEx Principles: Minimize Switching Contexts

- Kathy Korevec tl;dr:  Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I've learned a lot about what developers need to succeed: (1) Minimize switching contexts. (2) Remember, you are a chef cooking for chefs: Respect the craft. (3) Automate anything that can be automated. (4) Optimize for time to code. (5) Be mindful of breaking changes. People’s services depend on your services. (6) Don’t bury the lede.

featured in #389

Real-world Engineering Challenges #8: Breaking Up A Monolith

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "We’re diving into a massive migration project by Khan Academy, involving moving one million lines of Python code and splitting them across more than 40 services, mostly in Go, as part of a migration that took 3.5 years and involved around 100 software engineers."

featured in #388

Focus

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: From the CTO at Meta... "One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing." Andrew discusses the value and nostalgia of focus he experienced.

featured in #388

Setting Engineering Org Values

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses the following questions and the values he's found most effective: "What kinds of problems do values solve? Should engineering orgs have values at all? When does it make sense to establish values out? What makes values useful? How are engineering values distinct from a technology strategy? How should you roll out values?"

featured in #386

30-60 Days In A New Leadership Role: Run Experiments For Change

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: "We’re intentionally limiting this process to two experiments because tons of change at once will be scary and confusing for folks. We’re also going to limit the experiment timeline to 2-3 weeks; the goal is to be able to gather data at the end of your first 60 days in your new leadership role." After crafting experiments, develop your communication plan, implement your experiments and prepare to share the results.

featured in #385

How We Found Our Ideal Customer Profile

- James Hawkins tl;dr: "Creating an Ideal Customer Profile is one of the most important things we've ever done." James shows how this is reflected in the companies revenue. It enabled the company to make important decisions - they were better placed to describe what the company does, what the site looks and feels like, pricing model, and more. James also describes how the company approached creating this profile.

featured in #385