/Management

How Passwordless Works

- Alan Parra tl;dr: This post explains how passwordless can be implemented using modern technologies such as WebAuthn, while at the same time providing a better user experience and security than the traditional password-based approach.

featured in #409

Uber’s Engineering Level Changes

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: “Uber addressed this inconsistency in levels by updating engineering levels to be more in-line with the rest of the industry. The company pretty much renamed senior 2 engineer as staff engineer, and updated the titles from L6. They also added a new level 9.”

featured in #409

Is Critical Thinking The Most Important Skill For Software Engineers?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: “If someone cannot explain a concept without jargon, I now doubt they truly understand what they are talking about. The true test of properly understanding a given topic is whether you can teach it to someone else. Explaining your thoughts without the use of jargon - or gradually introducing jargon - is a form of teaching, as you need to adopt to someone who has less domain knowledge.” Gergely provides us with 4 tips on how to improve our critical thinking skills.

featured in #408

From Assumption To Next Step

- John Cutler tl;dr: John discusses how to go from risky assumption to next steps using a single phrase. “One of the significant challenges was what to do with all of the discomfort and anxiety-inducing assumptions. Teams understood the theory — why it might benefit them to surface assumptions, designate “operating assumptions”, prioritize risky assumptions, and make plans to reduce uncertainty where it counts.”

featured in #408

APIs Vs SDKs: Why You Should Always Have Both

tl;dr: This post explains what APIs and SDKs are, exploring the different use cases, examples and best practices for each, and explaining why having both are necessary.

featured in #408

Rescuing A Project In Progress

- Jason Fried tl;dr: “This isn't about calling in reinforcements or adding more resources. This is about stopping, slowing down, eliminating the spread of attention, honing in, and driving to completion.” Jason discusses the importance of establishing "completion discipline" in projects.

featured in #408

The Silent Killer Of Your Operating Practice: Fear

- Amanda Schwartz Ramirez tl;dr: Amanda creates example scenarios and ways of mitigating 5 common fears: (1) Fear of failure. (2) Fear of losing control. (3) Fear of conflict. (4) Fear of losing credibility. (5) Fear of missing something.

featured in #407

Measuring Developer Productivity And Happiness At LinkedIn

- Viktoras Truchanovicius tl;dr: We developed a new internal product called the Developer Insights Hub. It visualizes developer experience and happiness metrics describing key developer activities such code building, reviewing, publishing, as well as the sentiment towards the tools being used… this post provides an overview of how we approached metrics selection and design, system architecture and key product features.

featured in #407

Fast-Forwarding Decision Making

- James Stanier tl;dr: “I’ll pitch the takeaway up front, and it’s this: hold yourself accountable for making decisions and progressing discussions as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary. Be restless while a decision hasn’t been made. Dead time is your enemy. Be creative about ways of shaving minutes, hours and days from a decision point.” James gives several examples of how to approach this.

featured in #406

Slack

- Martin Fowler tl;dr: “A common approach with timeboxed iterations is to allocate as many user stories as possible to each iteration in order to maximize the utilization of the staff involved. Slack is the policy of deliberately leaving time that isn't allocated for stories, using that time for unplanned work. Although this seems inefficient, it usually yields a significant improvement for the productivity of a team.”

featured in #406