/Management

Enthusiasm: Managing Our Most Precious Resource

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “The enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves. They have context, in the form of accountability and purpose and approximate proportions, but to preserve enthusiasm they must make their own decision. And a fired up engineer is five times (for some value of five) as valuable as that same engineer just putting in hours.”

featured in #543

Learn What Role Based Access Control Is And How To Use It To Simplify Permission Management Within Organizations

- Brian Morrison tl;dr: Managing permissions in large SaaS applications can be a nightmare. Providing team owners a way to grant functionality to users in a simplified way can be the difference between companies purchasing your software or going with a competitor. Clerk provides you with a way to build this functionality with minimal effort.

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The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers

- Ben Northrop tl;dr: “After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation. It undergirds all of his decisions and interactions. It predicts what kind of code he'll write, what technologies he'll prefer, and even how he'll succeed on a given assignment. And it's often quite easy to peg for any given developer after just a few days of working with him or her.” 

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How to Write Great Tech Specs

- Nicola Ballotta tl;dr: Nicola covers: (1) What a tech specs document is, why it's important, and why it can sometimes be challenging to create one. (2) How to create outstanding tech specs. (3) A Notion system for creating tech specs. (4) Tips from both his own experience as well as the communities.

featured in #542

Build Vs Buy Part I: Complexities Of Building SSO And SCIM In-House

- Min Kim Amit Bhojraj tl;dr: One of the pitfalls of building SSO and SCIM from scratch is the ongoing engineering investment required to scale your solution — supporting more IdPs, dealing with expiring SAML certificates, and standardizing onboarding fragmentation. And this is after spending 3-6 months to develop the initial solution for a handful of providers. When factoring in feature expansion (domain verification, JIT provisioning, custom-mapped attributes, IdP role assignment), which is different from work related to maintenance and scalability, the total cost of ownership multiplies significantly.

featured in #542

The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers

- Ben Northrop tl;dr: “After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation. It undergirds all of his decisions and interactions. It predicts what kind of code he'll write, what technologies he'll prefer, and even how he'll succeed on a given assignment. And it's often quite easy to peg for any given developer after just a few days of working with him or her.” 

featured in #542

Ask For Advice, Not Permission

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: From the CTO at Meta: “One of the most common anti-patterns I see that can create conflict in an otherwise collaborative environment is people asking for permission instead of advice. This is such an insidious practice that it not only sounds reasonable, it actually sounds like the right thing to do: “Hey, I was thinking about doing X, would you be on board with that?”" Andrew argues that the problem with asking for permission is that you’re implicitly asking someone else to take some responsibility for your decision. Asking for advice creates advocates for your idea but doesn't saddle them with responsibility.

featured in #541

Humans >> Data

- Kent Beck tl;dr: Kent discusses his stance on measuring developer productivity: “Looking at numbers is one way to pay attention, but it’s a limited, biased, & temporary way. There is no perfectly balanced set of metrics that will “drive” better behavior. As soon as such a set is introduced, clever folks will begin to subvert the numbers to their own benefit, they aren’t trying to make things worse for their colleagues, users, & investors — that’s just how it works out.” He discusses the value of managing humans over data. 

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Objective Evaluations For AI Systems

- Kelly Moon tl;dr: AI systems are only as good as the benchmarks and evaluations they are measured against. Learn how to evaluate AI systems.

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It's In The Stories

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: “Sometimes, I think that this is what it’s all about: stories. And that, maybe, leadership is the act of producing the right stories, the anecdotes that are repeated by those around you, that carry the message you want out there.” Thorsten shares some examples. 

featured in #540