Management

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. Because a lot of them are horrible it is natural to want to improve them over time. I am going to describe a bit how I like my meetings and why. Some of my thinking has changed with being fully remote during the coronavirus crisis, but most of it applies to in person and remote meetings. An ideal meeting has a facilitator, the minimal length of time, the right attendees, non-attendees not fearing to miss out, everybody being focused and prepared. A good meeting can be more inclusive for all participants, by allowing everybody to arrive prepared and participate in a meaningful way. ...

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. Then the COVID-19 thing happened and Lead Dev organisers decided to cancel or postpone some of the 2020 conferences and also offer an online conference: Lead Dev Live 2020. It was a two day conference on April 7 and 8, 2020. Not only was it streamed live, but also completely free. Each day had a single track happening in the afternoon and evening CEST. Streaming was via one long YouTube stream for each day, which was well produced except for some technical issues that were quickly resolved. In parallel to this everybody had access to a Slack community for general chat, topic specific channels and networking. In the end I didn’t watch all of the talks, but most of them. I am just going to list the ones I recommend to watch if you get the chance. Overall I enjoyed the experience, they had some great speakers and some topics I can directly relate to. I noticed that I found the panels more difficult to follow, you get a lot of whitespace between the speakers and there is no consistent story. This makes it easy to lose concentration, check your messages or fetch a new cup of tea. A normal talk with a story and possibly slides can really grab your attention and take you on a journey. One thing that didn’t work at all for me were the Slack channels running in parallel to the talks. The main #leaddev-live channel was very noisy and just flooded with people just saying hello. Any announcements flew past so fast that it was pretty much unusable. Something like a channel only for announcements would have been more useful. You also run very quickly into the usual Slack problem of having too many channels and then too many notifications. I definitely would join another conference by Lead Dev. I might even pay for it. Would I go to a real Lead Dev conference? Yes, but only if it is close to me. I wouldn’t spend the time and money required to travel further than maybe a two hour flight. Day 1 The first day was focused on the effects of COVID-19 on management and remote work. YouTube stream day 1 Leading teams through times of uncertainty and upheaval [Panel] Camille Fournier, Lara Hogan, Rachana Kumar and Christian McCarrick https://youtu.be/yxiDblyYkrI Good insight into how different companies and engineering approach the crisis with some well known guests. Minimum Viable Business Continuity Management Meri Williams https://youtu.be/TCu0gJ_hLq8 Talking about all kinds of aspects of continuity management. From risk assessment, testing, planning and communication. Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software [Panel] Dan Berry, Jai Chakrabarti, Bryan Liles and Erica Stanley https://youtu.be/lsgbGRkysJE Rebuild or refactor in many words. Day 2 The second day was more of a mix of different topics. YouTube stream day 2 Tradeoffs on the road to Observability Liz Fong-Jones https://youtu.be/wkXKbC1GWIM Keep SRE and observability boring. Use the tools that you can easily obtain instead of reinventing the wheel. Designing effective OKRs [Panel] Aniela Crisan, Whitney O'Banner, Antonio Verardi and Heidi Waterhouse https://youtu.be/tBchi7FzRFU Panel about OKRs in general and in tech teams. I really enjoyed Whitney’s take on this. Her talk from 2019 “Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team” is also worth a watch. Another related talk watching from 2018, which was also played during one of the technical glitches in this conference is “Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers” by Melinda Seckington. Apps, stacks, and frameworks: avoiding “Shiny Object” syndrome Angel Rivera https://youtu.be/Zk9Rg0Hswu0 This talk was quite random, but still interesting. He talked about his experience of using a new shiny technology (MongoDB) without having any expertise in this himself or in the team. Risky business: taking risks in production Matthew Hawthorne and Leemay Nassery https://youtu.be/Np8NFmjLn4Q How to manage risk by using a/b tests, metrics, testing, … Building and conveying vision [Panel] Neha Batra, Lawrence Bruhmuller, Kevin Goldsmith and Maria Gutierrez https://youtu.be/I9-_4WYUEhE How to create and convey a message to your team.

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/ Stripe’s Will Larson on Designing a Performance Management System from Scratch https://blog.gitprime.com/designing-performance-management-systems/ Code As Craft with Rasmus Lerdorf | Nov 13th, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJJKZM8bruQ New – EC2 Auto Scaling Groups With Multiple Instance Types & Purchase Options https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-auto-scaling-groups-with-multiple-instance-types-purchase-options/ Schneier: More Spectre/Meltdown-Like Attacks https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/more_spectremel.html

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. Up to that point all of our projects where waterfall and we basically had no unit tests in our code. On the plane I decided we had to do major changes and we did these over the next years. I was still pretty inexperienced in leading a team, but this was one step into the right direction. By now most of the things mentioned in the book, like pair programming, small cycles, unit testing, agility are well used and documented. This small book is probably still worth a read. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity This book is one of the ones where the solution is so obvious that a one page summary would probably enough. Nonetheless this is a good book and gave me a better idea about organizing myself. I am using a mix of the paper approach for all the paper one still receives and Todoist for everything else. In the end it is just a form of Kanban or Inbox Zero. It doesn't matter how you manage your tasks, just keep your work in progress small and your tasks prioritized. Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time A collection of essays and interviews that gave me lots of ideas about DevOps and that side of a company in general. I still use it as a reference for things like post mortems. Because these are mostly stories it is an easy read and you don't have to read the book in sequence, just pick the ones that you find most interesting. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity Mostly interesting and inspiring because I am so hopeless bad at this. As an introvert the idea of being candid and even worse radical candid seems absurd. But I know it is one of the areas I have to work on and the book gave me new ideas in a nice form. It is a bit long though and does repeat the main points over and over again. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses I am not working at a start-up any more, neither am I on the business side. I just wish we had this in my time in London. We would have avoided a lot of pain and would probably be still around now. Implementing this in an existing setting is a lot harder unless you have buy in from the top. The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change A great book for engineers transitioning to management. Another book I would have loved to have had at my start-up, thankfully it didn't exist back then. My review of The Manager's Path. Definitely worth reading for all developers even if you don't plan to go into management. I wish I read this earlier Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time by John Allspaw Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Malone Scott The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Share book reviews and ratings with Christof, and even join a book club on Goodreads.

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. What I do I am the Technical Director at Devex. I am mostly a manager, but as we grow progressing into a manager of managers. My job is to make the product development run as smoothly and productive as possible. This includes slowly growing the team to adapt to a growing company. It also means making everyone in my team successful in his job by providing everything they need. I am also usually the first contact point when there any questions regarding technology from other teams or outside. I do make decisions about a lot of things and prefer to make an early decision to waiting for the perfect decision. What I am about I am an introvert, this means I get exhausted if I have a lot of meetings and no time in between to recover. Social events with a lot of people I don't know are especially taxing. I am very patient and prefer evolution over revolutions. I am the person who says "no" to most people, this goes for my team as well as the rest of the company. It is easier to say "yes" because it is preferred by most people and you always to want to help everyone. I tend to think a lot before I talk, this can be awkward in conversations. I think meetings with more than four people are usually a waste, unless they are highly structured or ritualised like a retrospective or an all hands meeting. All meetings should result in action items (having another meeting with the same group is not considered an action item). I prefer nudging over forcing people into one direction. I have strong opinions about how do to things, but I can be convinced with the right arguments. I strongly believe in being agile, from the project management side to programming. I try to be as transparent as possible, please nudge me if I am not I am pragmatic and prefer to have something good enough today, then something perfect in some distance future. I take the blame, but share the kudos. My schedule I am usually in the office from 9:00 to 18:00. I don't like to stay longer and will cancel meetings set up after 18:00 unless I agree that it is very important and can't be scheduled to another time. I don't read slack or email outside of working times. I live in my calendar and it is always really packed, but it is fully public and you can just schedule a meeting with me whenever you like. If you are on my team we will have regular 1:1s and also retrospectives. If something important comes up I am always available to talk. Communication My preferred communication medium for actionable items is email. Jira is on par with email. Slack also works, but I am treating it as asynchronous and will not respond as soon as possible, depending on the urgency. I might also not scroll back in a lot of channels when catching up. I will also post updates to the internal blog, maybe once a month. Finally there are the meetings, either 1:1s, team meetings or impromptu meetings. 1:1s I currently have my 1:1s every four weeks. I am trying to increase frequency by sharing the load with others. With indirect reports it will be more like once a quarter. The 1:1 is the place where you can bring up any topics that you are not comfortable sharing in retrospectives or other meetings. I am asking some questions to get the conversation started. These have evolved a bit over time. How is life? What are you worried about at the moment? What are you excited about at the moment? How can I help you learn and grow? Do you have any feedback for me? What I expect from you (if you are on my team) I expect you to try to do the best job you can. If there are any road blocks or problems I expect you to bring these up with me so we can make sure you don't get stuck. Come to me early when there is a problem to avoid any frustration. There will never be blame, we will just fix it together. Books I recommend The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time by John Allspaw, Jesse Robbins Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series) by Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Malone Scott Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen What I am doing aside from work Most of my free time I try to spend on my bicycle, this is where I decompress and my way of meditation. I am interested in urbanism and life sized cities and have strong opinions about this. I also like to follow the Linux and Open Source world. I am a contributor to the Fedora Linux distribution, but nowadays I have nearly no time to work on it. Me on the Internet If you like to keep up to date with my random rants on the internet / https://twitter.com/cdamian https://github.com/christofdamian/ https://www.instagram.com/christofdamian/