engineering-management - The Next Level

Prioritization is the Key to Fast Moving Teams

The key to moving quickly and delivering value as a team in a startup is ruthless prioritization. It's the acceptance of the fact that there is only one pipe and you can only get so much through that pipe in a given amount of time. So with that

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productivity

One weird trick so GitHub doesn't wreck your inbox

When you join a new GitHub organization it can quickly wreck your inbox. Here's a quick tip to prevent that mess.

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engineering-management Featured

Building Aggressively Helpful Teams

A simple two part trick to build teams that collaborate early, and often.

Semi-truck delivering stuff. Because delivery is what we do.

engineering-management Featured

KPIs for Early Stage CTOs

Metrics that you ought to be interested in as an early stage technology leader, for teams, individuals, and the organization as a whole.

engineering-management

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 Featured

Chaos Engineering with the Vacation Simulator

Increase resilience through team level chaos engineering using simulated vacations.

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.

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'

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.

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

fundamentals

Don't Rush Your Current Work

At work it can often feel like you need to hurry up and crank out the current piece of work. And so you think, maybe I'll just cut corners a bit. I'll just skip writing those tests. Or I'll just skip refactoring the code

engineering-management

Reviewing Code Reviews

Reviewing your team's code review is an often under-leveraged tool you can reach for as an engineering manager in order to improve the efficacy of your teams' code reviews. (That and instituting a code review playbook, but I'm assuming you've done that.) Don&

pull-requests

9 Common Pull Request Failure Modes

9 ways to get pull request reviews wrong, and how to fix them.

engineering-management

Reinforcing Stream Aligned Teams

Supplementing stream aligned teams while sidestepping classic engineering management blunders.

fundamentals

What are the Fundamentals?

If you don't have fundamentals that you can describe, practice, and measure, how do you know if you're getting better?

engineering-management

Making Training Time Stick

Recently I was asking some software engineering leaders about what they do for training for members of their team or organization. The answers wouldn't surprise most engineering leaders. Aside from many stating that their organizations don't offer any training, most called out the standard fare of

programming

Pull request reviews: There is no alternative!

A bit hyperbolic, but aside from pairing, it seems to me that there is still no alternative to a pull request review.