/Management

Common Authentication Implementation Risks And How To Mitigate Them

- James Hickey tl;dr: Data breaches are more common than ever. Ensuring a secure authentication system is critical to your trust with customers. Whether you build or buy your auth solution, this article offers insights into secure practices that can help keep you and your customers safe.

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How To Boss Without Being Bossy

- Jeff Wofford tl;dr: "Leaders command people. That’s kind of what a leader is: someone with the authority to direct the actions of others. But people don’t often appreciate being commanded. When you step into leadership you face this challenge: how do you direct the members of your team without offending them? How do you become a good boss, but not be “bossy”?" Jeff maps clarity and harshness to show how various phrases compare. 

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Taming Complexity With Reversibility

- Kent Beck tl;dr: As a system scales, whether it is a manufacturing plant or a service like ours, the enemy is complexity. If you don't confront complexity in some way, it will eat you. However, complexity isn't a blob monster, it has four distinct heads: (1) States: When there are many elements in the system and each can be in one of a large number of states, then figuring out what is going on and what you should do about it grows impossible. (2) Interdependencies: When each element in the system can affect each other element in unpredictable ways, it's easy to induce harmonics and other non-linear responses, driving the system out of control. (3) Uncertainty: When outside stresses on the system are unpredictable, the system never settles down to an equilibrium. (4) Irreversibility: When the effects of decisions can't be predicted and they can't be easily undone, decisions grow prohibitively expensive.

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Traits I Value

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: 15 traits valued by the CTO at Meta: (1) Ownership: Valuing individuals who take full responsibility for their tasks, allowing others to trust that these tasks will be handled competently without constant oversight. (2) Rigor: Preferring team members who think thoroughly and exhaustively, understanding all alternatives, assumptions, and limitations to ensure well-informed decision-making. (3) Bias for Action: Appreciating those who recognize the cost of gathering information and the cost of delay, and who act decisively to maintain progress.

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The 100 Best Bits Of Advice From 10 Years Of First Round Review

tl;dr: "End every meeting or conversation with the feeling and optimism you’d like to have at the start of your next conversation with the person. If you envision running into this person again and how you want that to go, it’ll undoubtedly influence how you navigate a present conversation — usually for the better. Chris Fralic on how to become insanely well-connected."

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The Five Principles Of Modern Developer Tools

- Chris Bell Sam Seely tl;dr: Engineering teams are increasingly outsourcing non-core, yet critical parts of their stack to third-party vendors. This post delves into the challenges and emerging solutions of using third-party services in your stack. It discusses five key principles of modern developer tools: code-based resource management, source control management, rich type definitions, CI/CD integration and managing tools as part of your deployment lifecycle.

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Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: Colm On Constant Work

- Werner Vogels tl;dr: This is why many of our most reliable systems use very simple, very dumb, very reliable constant work patterns. Just like coffee urns. These patterns have three key features. (1) They don’t scale up or slow down with load or stress. (2) They don’t have modes, which means they do the same operations in all conditions. (3) If they have any variation, it’s to do less work in times of stress so they can perform better when you need them most. There’s that anti-fragility again.

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Your Small Imprecise Ask Is A Big Waste Of Their Time

tl;dr: "Imprecise asks from managers and leaders cause a disproportionate amount of turmoil and wheel-spinning. To combat this, leaders should be very precise with the amount of time investment they’re asking for when they ask for things. A little bit of awkward precision up front can save major headaches down the line." The author shares examples to illustrate such asks. 

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Effective Engineering Teams

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: The Google research team concluded that the following were pillars of team effectiveness. Addy discusses each in depth: (1) Psychological Safety: "On our team, making a mistake is seen as an opportunity to learn rather than a blunder to be penalized." (2) Dependability: "I can count on my teammates to deliver on their promises and commitments." (3) Structure and Clarity: "We have a clear and effective roadmap for decision-making within our team." (4) Meaning: "The work I contribute to the team holds personal significance for me." (5) Impact: "I can clearly see how our team's efforts make a difference to the broader goals of the organization."

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Benchmarking

- Will Larson tl;dr: It’s easy to lean too heavily on benchmarks by believing that they answer questions: they don’t really do that. Benchmarks only ask questions, they never answer them. It’s up to whoever is using the benchmarks to extract the questions and do your own work to answer them. If you look at “R&D costs as a percentage of revenue” across companies, you’ll notice that some are four or five times higher than others. Are the high spenders early in making a calculated bet into releasing a new service, or are they just inefficient? Either, or both, could be true, and that’s the sort of interesting question-answer pair to work through when using benchmarks to evaluate.

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