Moving From IC To Engineering Manager
tl;dr: Best practices for transitioning from an IC to an engineering manager. Good reasons for the transition include a love for solving people problems and managing projects, while bad reasons include seeking more authority or escaping boredom. Necessary skills include communication, durability, technical competence, patience, and urgency. The article warns against the "Team Lead" role as a transitional step, as it often leads to failure, and advises starting new managers with "training wheels" to guide them through difficult situations. The emphasis is on ensuring the right motivations, skills, and support for a successful transition.featured in #441
How To Communicate When Trust Is Low (Without Digging Yourself Into A Deeper Hole)
- Charity Majors tl;dr: Charity emphasizes the importance of small, positive interactions and offers specific tactics to rebuild trust. These include speaking tentatively, sounding friendly, taking time to compose oneself, communicating positive intent, and seeking clarity. The author shares personal experiences and insights, highlighting the need to over-communicate and overcompensate to avoid misinterpretations that can further erode trust. One strategy is the emphasis on engineering positive interactions, even artificially, to maintain a healthy relationship balance.featured in #441
How Clerk Rolls Infra For Auth & User Management
tl;dr: The complex infrastructure required to build and operate an authentication system. It contrasts self-hosted authentication, where developers manage the infrastructure, with a hosted authentication solution, where all auth-related responsibilities are delegated to a specialized service. The article details the components and integrations involved, including the use of cloud services and third-party platforms like Sendgrid and Twilio. The hosted system ensures secure, scalable, and responsive authentication, with options for developers to bring their own infrastructure or configuration.featured in #441
How To Create Compound Efficiencies In Engineering
tl;dr: The article covers the shift towards efficiency in engineering in 2023 and outlines three compound efficiencies: real-time visibility into metrics, automating pull requests & code reviews, and protecting developer focus. By layering these efficiencies, teams can achieve elite performance. Sustainable efficiency in software engineering isn't about one-time decisions but building organizational habits that compound over time, leading to significant improvements in quality, speed, and business impact.featured in #440
The Best Approach I've Seen For Hiring New Engineers
- Jade Rubick tl;dr: A successful example of new engineer hiring through the "Ignite" program. In this program, junior engineers are hired to work on real company problems in groups, join different teams for several weeks, and then are placed on a permanent team. The program is effective in training and integrating junior engineers into the company's processes, providing a positive experience for them. Thoughtful management and structured onboarding can lead to more effective junior engineers, and the lessons from this program can be applied to companies of various sizes, especially those hiring 20-30 engineers annually.featured in #440
NetApp Leverages Time Series Data for Real-Time Resource Trending and Alerting
tl;dr: NetApp, a leader in cloud data services, storage systems and software, uses time series data for real-time resource trending, SLO/SLI calculations, and alerting. Their SRE team identifies trends in resource consumption for critical Linux servers, DB monitoring, and custom resource monitoring. The team appreciates the high ingest, tool integration, and performance of InfluxDB, their chosen time series database. They also value its integration with Grafana for dashboards and Slack for global team communication.featured in #440
Remote Work Requires Communicating More, Less Frequently
- Ben Balter tl;dr: Remote work demands a shift in communication style, emphasizing more content but less frequent interaction. This approach involves richer, more thoughtful exchanges like long-form writing or videos, rather than constant, interrupt-driven interactions. Asynchronous work allows for reflection, research, and synthesis, improving the quality and clarity of communication. It's likened to "gzip compression" for human communication, enabling greater throughput with fewer "packets." Tips for effective remote communication include choosing the right medium, writing clearly and comprehensively, recording engaging videos, and communicating proactively and asynchronously. This method leads to less time talking about work and more time actually doing it, optimizing for efficiency and flow.featured in #439
Building Software The Swarmia Way
- Hugo Kiiski tl;dr: We all know that there’s no single right way to build software. But because we love learning about how other high-performing software organizations approach team composition, rituals, technology choices, and more, we figured why not return the favor and open up our own workflow.featured in #439
Enabling Good Work Habits Through Reflective Goal-Setting
- Abi Noda tl;dr: Abi highlights a study on developers' productivity, revealing that reflective goal-setting leads to improvements. 84% of participants identified concrete goals through reflection, 80% saw positive behavior change, and 92% planned to maintain new habits. The key takeaway is that reflective goal-setting not only enhances awareness and productivity but also encourages lasting behavioral changes, empowering developers to gain control over their work.featured in #438
Bottleneck #04: Cost Efficiency
- Sofia Tania Stefania Stefansdottir tl;dr: This post discusses cost optimization for scale-ups by emphasizing the importance of a cross-functional team to analyze and execute cost-saving measures. It outlines strategies like rightsizing resources, using ephemeral infrastructure, and consolidating tools. A key takeaway is the need for a detailed analysis of cost drivers, such as compute vs storage vs network, to identify specific levers for cost reduction, ensuring alignment with the company's unique needs as it scales.featured in #438