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Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
Friday was my 9 year anniversary of starting as a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. Monday I was laid off.
272
How to run a miserable code review
Code reviews are a performance nobody paid for
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Amazon doubling down on return to office
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
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How to build trust as a new engineering manager
New managers often want to get everything right from the get-go. But, ironically, that would be their first mistake. Why? Because that's the total opposite of authenticity.
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What’s wrong with billable hours
I know a bunch of you already have your pitchforks out, so let me start out by establishing some goalposts for my premise. When I’m done, you may still want to skewer me, but at least it’ll be for the right reasons, if you do. Through the rest of the post, I’m going to draw...
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Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (2021)
Gamification works too well on me. I'll do anything for a high score, to complete a progress bar, or to unlock an achievement.
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The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we manage instead of the outcome, from the Empire State Building up.
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The heaviness of maintaining systems
Our systems and ourselves
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Preparing for missions in difficult places
Can I bring my emotional support dog?
280
The End of Front-End Development
Large language models like GPT-4 are becoming increasingly capable, at an alarming rate. Within a couple of years, we won't need developers any more! …Or at least, that's the narrative going viral on social media. I'm much more optimistic about what these AI advancements mean for the future of software development.
281
Better to micromanage than be disengaged
For a long time, I found the micromanager CEO archetype very frustrating to work with. They would often pop out of nowhere, jab holes in the work I had done without understanding the tradeoffs, and then disappear when I wanted to explain my decisions. In those moments, I wished they would trust me based on my track…
282
When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
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Repeating yourself thrice doesn’t turn you into a 3x developer
Three is a magic number. This is the number of things we can keep in our minds without losing focus. So, logically, a three-tier software…
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What Do We Owe Our Teams?
Many of my discussions with product leaders (CPOs, VPs and others who manage teams of product folks) are about the substance of product management: portfolios, competing stakeholders, pricing & packaging, tarot cards as a revenue forecasting model. Last week, though, in my product leadership workshop, we had an…
286
How to build toxic software teams
To build a toxic team, you must inject poison early and often
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Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decades
Yet commentators and politicians keep missing it
288
Corporate legibility for software engineers
Understand corporate legibility through the lens of a software engineer.
289
Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The hardest part of being a junior developer
Even though it was 12 years ago, I still remember what the most stressful part of being a junior developer was.
291
That won't scale: Present cost vs. future value
Thanks for reading Code Solo!
292
How to find your blind spots
You probably aren't qualified to dissect your own failures because you're the idiot who screwed everything up.
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Stéphane Graber has left Canonical
Stéphane Graber's website -
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Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems
In an organization with many teams, problems will arise that span across these teams and require solutions broader than an individual manager’s purview. These types of projects include things…
295
YOLO-Driven Development Manifesto
YOLO-driven development - not for the faint of heart
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Story Behind Hackathon Photo
How a random stream of events ended up creating a picture with 57 million views
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The Risks of Staying Put
Friends! Pals! Treasured work associates! Last month Mandy Brown wrote about how she struggled to quit her job and this bit hit me like a sledgehammer: “I...
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What’s the point of tech conferences?
It’s con season in the tech world. Yesterday evening I flew from Pluralsight’s Link/ unconference in New Orleans to Pycon US in Salt Lake City. New Orleanians are just as likely as not …
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Communication as a critical business skill
There is more to communication than just the correct use of words, phrases, and clauses. Let’s look at some of the communication skills that don’t get enough attention.