/Management

Writing An Engineering Strategy

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) An example of an engineering strategy. (2) Richard Rumelt’s definition of strategy: diagnosis, guiding policies, and coherent actions. (3) How and when to write your engineering strategy. (4) Dealing with undocumented strategies in other functions. (5) Structuring your guiding policies around resource allocation, fundamental rules, how decision are made. (6) Maintaining the right altitude in your strategy by ensuring guiding principles are applicable, enforced, and create leverage. (7) The most common kinds of coherent actions in engineering strategies. (8) Whether strategy should be executive-lead.

featured in #389

Saving Millions On Logging: Finding Relevant Savings

- Rich Marscher tl;dr: "At HubSpot, our relatively new Backend Performance team is tasked with improving the runtime and cost performance of our backend software. In this two-part blog series, we will look at a structured method we use for approaching cost savings work and demonstrating how we apply it at HubSpot to save millions on the storage costs of our application logs.”

featured in #389

The Developer’s Guide To SSO

tl;dr: Single Sign-On via SAML or OAuth is often one of the first features an engineering team needs to build as a product gains traction among larger customers. We explore how it works, how to add it to your app, and best practices for implementation.

featured in #389

DevEx Principles: Minimize Switching Contexts

- Kathy Korevec tl;dr:  Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I've learned a lot about what developers need to succeed: (1) Minimize switching contexts. (2) Remember, you are a chef cooking for chefs: Respect the craft. (3) Automate anything that can be automated. (4) Optimize for time to code. (5) Be mindful of breaking changes. People’s services depend on your services. (6) Don’t bury the lede.

featured in #389

Real-world Engineering Challenges #8: Breaking Up A Monolith

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "We’re diving into a massive migration project by Khan Academy, involving moving one million lines of Python code and splitting them across more than 40 services, mostly in Go, as part of a migration that took 3.5 years and involved around 100 software engineers."

featured in #388

Focus

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: From the CTO at Meta... "One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing." Andrew discusses the value and nostalgia of focus he experienced.

featured in #388

Async Standup Reports For Fewer Status Meetings

tl;dr: Automated team progress updates via Slack or any chat you use. Make sure less time is spent on meetings and more on building.

featured in #388

Uptime, Status Pages, And Transparency Calculus

tl;dr: "It is a real-world example of Goodhart’s Law, in that as soon as we began using uptime as a target, it stopped being a useful measure. So what is an ideal alternative? For me, as a naive engineer, I’d love to see the industry start viewing clear and transparent communication in past incidents as positive signal about a working relationship. After all, we know incidents are a fact of life, and it’s much better to be honest about them than hide."

featured in #387

Setting Engineering Org Values

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses the following questions and the values he's found most effective: "What kinds of problems do values solve? Should engineering orgs have values at all? When does it make sense to establish values out? What makes values useful? How are engineering values distinct from a technology strategy? How should you roll out values?"

featured in #386

What's Identity-Native Infrastructure Access?

tl;dr: Unlock all Teleport Connect sessions to learn about infrastructure access from DoorDash, Dropbox, Discord, Vonage, and others when you RSVP for the Feb 9th event.

featured in #386