Curated Content August 2022
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of August.
August's list is a little bit shorter than my usual curated content list. I can't say if that's because I didn't read or listen to as much this month, or if I was just busy preparing for ElixirConf.
Either way, you've got a shorter run this time around.
Articles
An in-depth guide to everything you should do in your first three months as a first-time manager of managers
Lena Reinhard
A pretty comprehensive high level guide I found useful to think about for those looking to ensure they're covering their bases as a manager of managers.
Binaries over priorities
Jason Fried really clearly articulates an important way to think about priorities on a team in a startup. The only priority that matters is the boolean of yes, we're working on this right now, or no, we're not. Everything else is a nice fairytale you're telling yourself.
Books
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software in Public - Nadia Eghbal
As someone intimately familiar with open source, a lot of the start of this one is slow, but towards the end Nadia showcases some really interesting features of different kinds of open source communities and projects, and how we can and should consider treating them differently in order to ensure long term sustainability.
For example she handles how some open source is more about celebrity and individual contributors, and encouraging more broad contribution can actually be a tax on them, where we ought to be raising the barrier to contribution to ensure it's more meaningful. Would recommend for anyone looking into open source and its importance to society and software engineering.
Tweets
Lesson I was taught when I worked for my university's IT support department in 2009:
— Thomas Frank (@TomFrankly) August 29, 2022
Every support call must have an article in the department's support knowledge base.
If you take a call, and the customer's question doesn't have a support article, you have to write one.
While not a perfect rule, I've found this great for startups, whether engineering, support, sales, or any other departments as way to ensure that you can scale. This knowledge base can be internal or externally facing, but a great exercise either way.