Leadership

I can’t remember when I started to listen to podcasts. I am sure I was not an early adopter. It might have been around 2004 using iPodder on Linux with the first iPod and later an iPod Shuffle. Over the years I used various tools and devices to download podcasts and now have settled on Pocket Casts on Android. It has nice sync functionality between multiple devices and a useful web interface too. The web app is also useful to pull up the recently starred episodes for my Friday Links. ...

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. ...