I’ve come to consider that it doesn’t matter too much what activity you choose to get a discussion going. What matters most is regular reflection, hearing all the voices in a team, and making progress together. — Jono Hey in Rose, Thorn, Bud - Sketchplanations
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) Rapid growth. The product went from zero to 5 million users in around 12 months after announcing an invite-only beta. Small team. Bluesky was built with a small team of 3 engineers during the first year, and with 12 software engineers at the time of publication.
What should a manager goal be? Become redundant. What should a manager do all day? Jack Shit What is a great way to test the quality of a manager? Send them on a multi-week vacation and see what happens. Does everything keep running, or does things grind to a halt? Does the team still deliver, or things are completely blocked? Is there any visibility during this time of what this team is doing, or does it seem the team fell off the face of the earth? For extra browny points, does the team keep self-improving during this time, or does progress stall? ...
BICEPS — PALOMA MEDINA There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: … Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work. Belonging Improvement Choice Equality/ Fairness Predictability Significance See also: Coaching Questions Cheat Sheet - Google Docs Getting to Know Others’ BICEPS Core Needs
The pernicious effect of having a separate testing team: How Big Tech does Quality Assurance (QA) - by Gergely Orosz The change in the number and type of tests the Visual Studio Team Services experienced after merging the dev and the test teams. Before the merge: end-to-end tests dominated, but unit and integration tests were rare. This flipped after the merge. (Microsoft Dev Blogs) ...
Pairing vs. Code Review: Comparing Developer Cultures Prerequisites for success There are a few nonnegotiables that are common across both of these paradigms. Solid continuous integration Talented core developers Agreement on the importance of code quality Iterative self-organization The joys of pairing Everybody gets better together Pairing can balance the natural daily ebbs and flows of energy A peer generates motivation for self-improvement Tactical decisions are made more easily and with better results [Stronger] concept of collective code ownership but, ...
How Medium Is Building a New Kind of Company with No Managers For two years, Stirman managed a team at Twitter and never felt quite right about it. There was always the tension between being their boss and being their peer. (…) He started taking his reports out to lunch, to drinks, to coffee to see what was up. How was their wife settling into her new job? Did escrow close on their new house? This is the stuff that people bring into work with them but never talk about, Stirman says. As soon as you ask, the pressure starts to dissipate. ...
The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor | cek.log The 5 Ps : PURPOSE, PRINCIPLES, PRIORITIES, PLAN, AND PEOPLE (…) a tool that helps projects be focused: the “5Ps”: Purpose : Why do we exist? Why are we in business? Where do we want to be in the future? What will we deliver? Principles : What are the non-negotiable rules and key strategies? How will we act? Priorities : What’s the framework for tradeoffs? Plan : How are we going to stage and tackle solving the problems? What are the known dates & forcing functions on the calendar? People : Who’s accountable for every key part of the plan? There are tons of frameworks/tools for helping people understand roles & responsibilities. (…) They can all be made to work, as long as you don’t over-do it (just like you should not over-do the 5 Ps). To illustrate (…) I’ll use RACI : ...
Doodle: easy scheduling Doodle radically simplifies the process of scheduling events, whether they’re board or team meetings, dinners with friends, reunions, weekend trips, or anything else.
(via #E2sday: Roles on a Team and How They Apply to the Enterprise | The Future of Work )