Britton Broderick - The Next Level

Doing it all is not your job, Team Leader!

In a leadership role your job is to grow your team and deliver value. You can't do that if you're too busy trying to do it all.

engineering-management

Chaos Engineering with the Vacation Simulator

Increase resilience through team level chaos engineering using simulated vacations.

programming

Pairing - Not Just for Writing Code!

Pairing is a powerful collaboration tool, and it's not just for writing code. It's a powerful asset in any stage of the software development lifecycle.

curated-content

Curated Content October 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of October.

elixir

Setting Up an Elixir Development Environment

Getting your development environment setup with Elixir doesn't have to be hard. Here's a quick guide to getting started.

curated-content

Curated Content September 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of September.

curated-content

Curated Content August 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of August.

curated-content

Curated Content July 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of July.

productivity

Spending Your Time Consciously Through Time Tracking

Time tracking personally and professionally can lead to a number of insights to improve your life. Spend your time consciously.

engineering-management

How Tech is Creating Its Own Dust Bowl

Historically, farmers in the USA have neglected managing the health of their soil. This is because there has always been “more land out west”. This is what led to the Dust Bowl, during which as much as 75% of the top soil in some places was lost. This resulted in

hiring

Moving Fast in Hiring Gives You an Edge

Streamlining your hiring process is a source of competitive advantage. Measure it, and improve.

curated-content

Curated Content June 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of June.

architecture

Volatility and Software Architecture

Change is the only constant. But without further framing this particular truism isn’t very useful for informing how you ought to architect your system.

continuous-integration

Shifting Compliance Left with Licensed and GitHub Actions

Ensuring compliance with open source software licensing can be challenging for software engineering leaders, but there are great tools available in open source that can help you to get started.

programming

Finding Collective Ownership of the Codebase

Code is not mine, it’s ours. Through that our code is mine. There's something incredibly harmful about an individual owning a piece of code. When I say owning a piece of code I mean they feel like they have a right, above and beyond the rights of other individuals

management

The Water Cooler Outside Time and Space

People usually worry about recreating the serendipitous water cooler talk in a remote context. In fact Marissa Goldberg (@mar15sa on Twitter) has a great thread about this very topic. It's an important and worthwhile consideration as a leader. Today though, I'm going to turn the issue on its head, and

curated-content

Curated Content May 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of May.

programming

Writing Code as if Deep Work is Impossible

If you work in your own office, and regularly have uninterrupted stretches of deep work, congratulations, you and your organization are doing many things right. But consider for a moment if that’s the situation for everyone on your team. And then consider if it’s likely to stay true

productivity

Pomodoros vs Deep Work

The COVID based home office can be a hotbed of interruptions. Your kids and partner feel like you’re around, so they can just drop in real quick to ask you a question, or for a quick hand. And feeling like you’re chained to your desk for 8 hours

engineering-management

Nothing's on Fire... So Now What?

So you've done it. No more fires. You're the dog that has caught the car that you've spent so long chasing, you didn't know what you'd do when you finally caught it. You can start to feel like you're missing something important. Or that you're being complacent. Or maybe things

startups

Strategic Planning as a Pre-Product, Pre-Funding Startup

Or: Pick a north star and start moving that direction

engineering-management

Can Your Team's Velocity Be Too Fast?

Velocity as measured by frequency of deploys can be too fast. How to address that depends on the causes.

curated-content

Curated Content: April 2021

A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile from the month of April.

engineering-management

Killing Momentum with Good Intentions

Today's story is a story about failure on my part. One of the joys of being an engineering leader is mentoring and guiding folks towards new shared best practices, mental models, and design patterns. One of my teams had been incrementally delivering a mission critical set of features enabling a

pull-requests

What's in a Code Review?

What's in a good code review? Where do you start? There are so many different angles we can take this one, depending on the goals of the organization and the team. Let's start by laying some groundwork. What can code review get us? Increased Code Quality - Improved code quality