Curated Content August 2022

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

An in-depth guide to everything you should do in your first three months as a first-time manager of managers — Lena Reinhard

A step-by-step guide to your first role as a manager of managers with lots of practical tips and templates! Includes topics like managing your time, your boss, and your new teams, how to get confidence in your teams, and how to feel successful in your new role.

Lena ReinhardLena 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

Low, medium, high. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Must have, should have, could have, don’t need. These are various forms of priorities. People seem to love them. I’ve always hated them. Especially when it comes to product development. When it comes to choosing what to do, it’s always binary for me. Yes or no. Now…

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:

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.
— Thomas Frank (@TomFrankly) August 29, 2022

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.