/Productivity

Hard To Discover Tips And Apps For Making MacOS Pleasant

- Tristan Hume tl;dr: "Inspired by a few different conversations with friends who’ve switched to macOS where I give them a whole bunch of tips and recommendations..." Tristan also provides suggestions for iOS and productivity apps.

featured in #205

My Org Mode Flow

- Christine Dodrill tl;dr: "Emacs has a package that helps me organize my workflow, focus my note-taking and even keep a timeclock for how long I spend working on tasks. This package is called Org mode, and this is my flow for using it."

featured in #205

Debugging Engineering Velocity And Leading High-performing Teams

- Smruti Patel tl;dr: At the planning stage, "drive precision through early organizational alignment, and prioritization of user cohorts." During execution "dive speed through focus, iteration, unblocking and de-risking your projects" and "quality through early and rigorous testing."

featured in #201

Do More By Doing Less

- Zain Rizvi tl;dr: When Zain was contemplating his previous side projects, he realized "the dead projects had something surprising in common: I abandoned them about two weeks after starting." Motivation ran out. Now, he ensures future projects are scoped to be completed within 2 weeks.

featured in #201

A Tale Of Webpage Speed, Or Throwing Away React

- Alexander Solovyov tl;dr: Despite championing React, Alexander started to feel that it led to "some questionable practices" e.g. "hovers in JS (rather than in CSS) among others. As a result, he developed TwinSpark, a framework for declarative HTML enhancement.

featured in #201

Maintaining Your State

- Sarah Baca tl;dr: "One pattern I’ve noticed in myself is the need to perform perfectly. And if I am learning, which necessitates doing something poorly, then I think there is something wrong with me." Sarah outlines the 3 states and how they help her through this.

featured in #194

Questionable Advice: Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?

- Charity Majors tl;dr: Charity doesn't believe so - metric can be gamed, preferring a combination of (1) impact focused, outcome-based management (2) team level health metrics (3) engineering ladder and regular lightweight reviews (4) managers who are well calibrated across the org. Teams should also use the 4 DORA metrics.

featured in #193

Making Time to Change, Part 1

- Phil Le-Brun tl;dr: The author dispels the myth that "employees simply don’t have the time to take on more work" citing organizational issues of ownership, opacity of issues, lack of emotional engagement. Phil runs through Muda, a "catch-all term for non-value-added activities."

featured in #192

The Two Things Killing Your Ability to Focus

- William Treseder tl;dr: We are overwhelmed with distractions and over-rely on meetings. There are 5 daily practices that can help, outlined here.

featured in #189

How Our VP Of Engineering Used Data To Support Our Engineering Team On A Human Level

- Hillary Nussbaum tl;dr: As the team became remote, time spent more time working but were getting less done. The main cause was a lack of access to information and poor communication. 4 steps were put into place. 

featured in #182