Curated Content January 2023
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of January.
Articles
Internal comms for executives
A great article from Will Larson on how to ensure communication is maintained between executives and their organizations.
This is especially important for remote organizations where this communication cadence is likely the primary way folks receive information from the executive team.
That said, in a sufficiently large organization either the hierarchy or the span of control becomes deep or wide enough that for the individual it might as well be considered remote and so this is incredibly important there as well.
Chelsea Troy's Series on Remote Async Communications
Submitting Pull Requests
View all posts by Chelsea
Submitting a PR with an eye for the archeological record is important. It allows folks to easily review, and, if done to the level of excellence that Chelsea shows here, it would allow someone to pick up an otherwise orphaned project and quickly become productive.
Pairs extremely well with Chelsea's article on reviewing pull requests, which done well, are quite intense.
Sharing Context on Slack (or similar)
View all posts by Chelsea
A baseline of good practices for using Slack as a tool for your organization. This helps ensure remote teams share written context well, with minimal redundancy.
Pairs extremely well with Chelsea's article on handling communication in a remote environment, when you can't tap folks on the shoulder.
Storing Context in Commit Messages
View all posts by Chelsea
Commit messages are an area that I've personally seen as hypothetically useful for folks to preserve the history of a project, but often isn't done well, and many commit logs become something akin to:
commit 9d4c7c2bb11ecc28c5e9d9ba513f215f34b0ad0d
Author: Almost Every Commit Author
Date: Fourth
send help
commit 8d4c7c2bb11ecc28c5e9d9ba513f215f34b0ad0c
Author: Almost Every Commit Author
Date: Third
hopefully fix...
commit 7d4c7c2bb11ecc28c5e9d9ba513f215f34b0ad0b
Author: Almost Every Commit Author
Date: Second
Less detailed description of a fix for the first commit.
commit 6d4c7c2bb11ecc28c5e9d9ba513f215f34b0ad0a
Author: Almost Every Commit Author
Date: First
Super detailed message about what we're doing and why.
Chelsea's suggestions help remedy this, not just by giving you a set of better practices, but also a set of different types of commit messages to use in different contexts.
No Deadlines for You! Software Development Without Estimates, Specs, or Other Lies
Dan MilsteinThe post's clickbait title almost turned me off of reading it entirely.
While I want to do better with deadlines and specs, I believe the spirit of this article ought to be the foundation of how you operate a technology organization.
Your job is to solve real problems by real business deadlines, and often specs and estimation is not the primary driver of value there.
It's trust that you all are rowing in the same direction and working to solve the same problems given the same constraints.
Overall, this approach means you will constantly be adjusting your understanding of the most valuable way to spend your time and constantly keeping the business folks in the loop + offering them meaningful choices. This is not, in any way, “we don’t need no stinking estimates; we’re code cowboys. Just trust in the full force of our awesomeness.” It’s turning the entire software dev process into an ongoing conversation with the rest of the business — where information is quickly getting into the hands of people who can make decisions about it. And, where “information” means things you know/have learned and an understanding of what you don’t yet know — i.e., important risks.
Engineering Levels (Runn)
While not perfect, this is one of the leveling templates that resonates with me and my needs as an early stage CTO. It's quite similar to Basecamp's.
It's likely not going to be structured enough in order to actually facilitate growth in a larger organization, especially given much higher levels of specialization necessary.
Books
No books to recommend this month in the vein of advancing your career in technology.
A Memory Called Empire
If you'd like some fiction though, I really enjoyed the Hugo Award winner for Best Novel A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. It's a great piece of science fiction. (Obviously, or it wouldn't have won a Hugo.)
Conference Talks
While I listened to a few conference talks during the month of January, none made the cut of being worth adding to the curated content list.
Podcasts
I didn't listen to many podcasts during January, so I come empty handed with recommendations for them this month.
Tweets
9 years ago, as a Principal Engineer at a 200 person company:
— Vic 🌮 (@VicVijayakumar) January 13, 2023
my job is just breaking up fights, doing what no one else [wants to do / is thinking about]. I wonder what big company Principals do.
today, as a Principal at a 8000 person company:
oh it’s the same job.
I'm sure I had more tweets that were worthwhile, but I failed to keep track of them well this month, so we've just got the single funny one.