/Management

In Praise Of Stacked PRs

- Ben Congdon tl;dr: "The practice of breaking up a large change into smaller, individually reviewable PRs which can depend on each other, forming a DAG." Ben discusses advantages, including that stacked PRs are easier & quicker to review, since there are fewer changes to sign-off on, and easier to rollback if they cause breakage.

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6 Tips To Overcome Scaling Challenges Like Design Decisions, Tech Debt, And Developer Satisfaction

- Rachel Potvin tl;dr: (1) Tackle tech debt to keep morale up. (2) Create processes for fan-out work, where multiple engineering teams are involved in tackling a project. (3) Use design guidance to simplify design reviews. (4) Use council meetings to make aligned technical decisions. (5) Assign DRIs for effective decision making. (6) Create a developer satisfaction survey. 

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How To Prevent Secrets From Ending Up On Developer's Machines

- Ryan Blunden tl;dr: Even with environment variable storage offered by modern hosting platforms and secrets managers provided by every cloud, developer's machines are still littered with secrets in unencrypted text files because local development was left out of the picture. Learn how to prevent secrets from ending up on developer's machines.

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Flo Health’s Path To The Hiring Strategy In Engineering

- Maksim Koutun tl;dr: A year ago, the company had the typical hiring problems of a hyper-growth stage startup. "If you formed a new team, hiring could eat up all your time. On the other hand, managers on stable teams did not participate in hiring, and we had an organizational bias." Maksim describes how the company instrumented a new process to reduce steps, create feedback loops, develop a "pull", vs push system, and more.

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Good Goals

- Michael Siliski tl;dr: Post covers: (1) Why set goals (2) Characteristics of good goals: focused, concise, comprehensible, objectively assessable, challenging but possible, user oriented, states not activities. (3) Heuristics for testing goals e.g. reframing actions as outcomes.

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Limiting Work In Progress As A Manager

- Erik Wiffin tl;dr: "The demands on a manager’s time are endless and sometimes it feels like you’re being pulled in every direction at once. These demands can make it hard to focus, they make it hard to move from reacting to problems to anticipating them. In this article, I’d like to talk about how I’ve limited demands on my time, counterintuitively doing more with less."

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The State Of Internal Tools 2022

tl;dr: Since 2020, we’ve surveyed developers for our State of Internal Tools report. We set out to find how companies build internal tools, who uses them, and how teams measure their impact on the business. Discover our highlights from this year’s State Of Internal Tools here.

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You Will Always Have More Problems Than Engineers

- Matt Schellhas tl;dr: "Yet as companies far and wide try to use technology to solve the world’s ills, they grapple with an inviolable truth: there always will be more problems than engineers... that has consequences," which Matt discusses here.

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Remote Development At Slack

- Sylvestor George tl;dr: In this article, “remote development environments” refer to AWS EC2 instances where engineers make code changes and can see a running Slack application with those changes.

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Process Has A Bad Rap

- Paulo André tl;dr: "Why do so many processes tell people to behave slightly different from what common sense tells them to do?" Paulo discusses a framework to design processes: (1) Purpose: what is this process supposed to make either possible or significantly simpler? (2) Principles: what orients the design of this process towards its purpose? (3) Practices: how is the process to be executed? 

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