I used to really hate meetings. As a developer they seem to just get into the way of doing real work. You sit in a room with other people who are probably thinking the same thing and you are itching to get back to your desk and do “real work”. But at some point you specialise, teams grow and you need some way to sync up. Suddenly you realise that meetings are where some decisions are made and you want to join as many as possible. ...
I heard of the Lead Dev conference series some time at the end of the last year. There are not many conferences that focus on engineering leaders, most of the technology conferences are focused on specific technologies, methodologies or the business side. It was too late for the Berlin 2019 conference, so I set my eyes on either the London or Berlin 2020 conference. In the end I decided against London, because I wanted to avoid short plane trips as much as possible and staying longer in London also wasn’t an option. ...
We have hackdays this week, so this is a bit early. Schneier: The Pentagon Is Publishing Foreign Nation-State Malware https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/the_pentagon_is.html Android: a 10-year visual history https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/7/2585779/android-10th-anniversary-google-history-pie-oreo-nougat-cupcake Kellan: What I’m up to: tech leadership http://laughingmeme.org/2018/11/12/what-im-up-to-tech-leadership/ The next version of HTTP won’t be using TCP https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/the-next-version-of-http-wont-be-using-tcp/ New – Redis 5.0 Compatibility for Amazon ElastiCache https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-redis-5-0-compatibility-for-amazon-elasticache/ PageSpeed Insights, now powered by Lighthouse https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/11/pagespeed-insights-now-powered-by.html Basecamp: Postmortem on the read-only outage of Basecamp on November 9th, 2018 https://m.signalvnoise.com/postmortem-on-the-read-only-outage-of-basecamp-on-november-9th-2018-9165c315ee7f Answer these 10 questions to understand if you’re a good manager https://qz.com/work/1447711/how-to-tell-if-youre-a-good-manager/ ...
When I wrote the review of The Manager’s Path I started to think about other books I wish I had read earlier. Usually these triggered some kind of change in how I approach my work or life. This list is definitely incomplete and I will add more to the goodreads list at the bottom of this post. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck I still remember when and where I read this for the first time. It was on a plane from the US OSCON back to London where I had my start-up. ...
Original is here: https://github.com/christofdamian/manager-readme#manager-readme Update December 2020: I decided to make the repository private for now. I have some doubt if a manager README makes sense and mine was also not up to date. I might pick this up again in the future. Manager README? A few people (not only managers) now share information in a README or how-to style document on the web. The first one I came across was How to Rands. I thought it is a good idea for new team members, but also for people in the company who don’t have constant contact with me. ...