/Management

3 Critical Skills You Need To Grow Beyond Senior Levels In Engineering

- Irina Stanescu tl;dr: (1) Learning to scale yourself: Maximizing what you can do on your own by ruthlessly prioritizing your time and teaching / delegating as much as you can. (2) Navigating ambiguity: detective work, isolating uncertainty, dividing and conquer, making decisions with incomplete information, being able to pivot. (3) Influencing without authority. 

featured in #513

3 Critical Skills You Need To Grow Beyond Senior Levels In Engineering

- Irina Stanescu tl;dr: (1) Learning to scale yourself: Maximizing what you can do on your own by ruthlessly prioritizing your time and teaching / delegating as much as you can. (2) Navigating ambiguity: detective work, isolating uncertainty, dividing and conquer, making decisions with incomplete information, being able to pivot. (3) Influencing without authority. 

featured in #512

1-Measure-3-1

- Anna Shipman tl;dr: “A format I have found useful for making proposals is 1-measure-3-1. This is a variation on the 1-3-1 problem-solving method, focused specifically on proposals: (1) The problem to solve or opportunity to grasp. (2) Measure: how will we know it’s solved / the opportunity is met. What metrics are we looking to shift, or outcomes are we looking to achieve? (3) What are the three options we have considered (4) Our one recommendation.”

featured in #512

JWTs vs. Sessions: Which Is Right For You?

- Lydia Gorham tl;dr: Both JWTs and session cookies are viable approaches to solving the issue of persisting authentication and authorization context in a stateless HTTP world, but they take fairly different approaches that have their own pros and cons.” Lydia breaks down the trade-offs and explains how you can use JWTs and sessions together to achieve a best of both worlds.

featured in #512

Finding Stuck Energy

- Paulo André tl;dr: Everyone has a switch. Your job is to find it. If you don’t, all the latent energy this person has will remain untapped. To find that switch, you have to temporarily forget the work and focus on the human. Build a relationship. It’s never wasted time. “What is something you found really interesting recently? Teach me all about it.” is a good question to see what lights them up — and, if you pay attention, you’ll likely hear in the answer important clues that might help you change something at work.

featured in #511

An Open Letter To Auth Providers

tl;dr: The first job of any auth company is to protect its customers – before anything else. Somewhere along the way it feels like a lot of auth providers lost sight of the thing that matters: You, their customers.

featured in #511

The Manager As Debugger

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: The best engineering managers are often great debuggers. Camille argues that there are overlapping skills between debugging complex systems and managing teams. “Managing teams is a series of complex, black boxes interacting with other complex, black boxes. These black boxes have inputs and outputs that can be observed, but when the outputs aren’t as expected, figuring out why requires trying to open up the black box and see what is going on inside.”

featured in #510

How AI Companies Like Copy.ai, Jasper, And AI21 Labs Are Using WorkOS For Enterprise-Grade Auth

tl;dr: Copy.ai is a leading AI tool for sales and marketing teams. Over the last few years, they had explosive growth and needed a new auth platform that could support SSO and SCIM provisioning (features requested by larger customers). With WorkOS, they were able to add SSO and Directory Sync in less than 2 weeks, immediately unblocking enterprise deals. They also successfully migrated hundreds of thousands of active users to WorkOS via AuthKit and User Management, which supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free.

featured in #510

Basic Things

- Alex Kladov tl;dr: “After working on the initial stages of several largish projects, I accumulated a list of things that share the following three properties: (1) They are irrelevant while the project is small. (2) They are a productivity multiplier when the project is large. (3) They are much harder to introduce down the line.”

featured in #510

The Tarzan Method

- James Stanier tl;dr: “Performance review season always gets people thinking: where am I going? Where do I want to be next year? Why haven't I managed to get that promotion this time around? What's the point of all of this anyway?” James discusses the patterns he commonly sees in reports and how being transfixed on a single goal can do more harm than good.

featured in #509