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Managers can code on whatever keeps them off the critical path
Should engineering managers write code?: Spending time in meetings and working through complex team relationship issues leaves you feeling more drained than energized most days. You look longingly at your team and feel a slight tinge of envy. You want to code again. The good news is that you can! The bad news is that […]
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The paradox of producing process
The agency to create the system or process you want to work in (axiomatically?) implies you’ll rarely get to work in the system because you’re spending a lot of time working on the system by communicating/iterating/supporting it. 🤷🏻‍♂️
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Like caveats? Try writing about leading teams!
It’s tricky to write about leading software teams. Herein, reflections, not complaints, on pursuing higher software leadership truths. Many of which are riffs on 4 Reasons Writing About Software is Hard: Writing is actually an incredibly relevant skill for engineering leadership (and engineering in general), but it’s still hard. You can have all the insights […]
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Benchmarking Rails apps in 5 bullets
When in doubt, measure. Twice! For ad-hoc/napkin estimates, I use Benchmark.ms { …the code… } to size up the performance of Ruby code. When I want to do The Science to compare approaches, I use benchmark-ips. It works a lot like Benchmark, but does all the cold start, iteration, and math for you. It’s great, […]
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The Beatles 🤝 Timeless leadership lessons
The Economist, The Beatles and the art of teamwork: Take the role of Ringo, for example. When he is not actually playing, the band’s drummer spends most of his time either asleep or looking bewildered. When the other three musicians bicker, Ringo smiles beatifically. To a casual observer, he might appear dispensable. But musically, nothing […]
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Better know a standard library
Read your current/new language’s standard library. Highly recommended for developers of all experience levels. You’ll pick up the idioms, you’ll discover something useful. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder if they’re making a sequel! My favorites are prelude.hs (which, sadly, does not seem to be the file that Haskell bootstraps itself from any more 🤔) […]
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Offloading fast operations in Ruby by data structure
Noteflakes: A Compositional Approach to Optimizing the Performance of Ruby Apps — the idea is to offload “inner-loop”-type operations from Ruby to C-extensions. The clever twist is this happens via data-structure-as-language. Ruby being Ruby, you can wrap a DSL around the data structure generation to reduce the context switch from Ruby to offloaded operations. There’s […]
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Don’t be spooky
It’s possibly the best advice for managers I’ve given so far. When you’re communicating with your team, lead with context and reassurance. Never message someone on your team, “let’s talk when you get a minute”. That’s void of information and scary as heck! I have to remind myself of this when I’m rushing. It’s faster […]
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Would you pay more for a noisy computer?
Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense, Matt Webb: I kinda miss the days when I could hear the hard drive of my computer. If it was taking a while to response (say, when opening a big file), there was a difference between the standard whirr chugga chugga ch-ch-ch chugga seek pattern, […]
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Math-y and/or word-y
I’m a developer who (formerly) recoiled at math, especially calculus and matrices. Instead, I thought, I loved the language-y parts of software development. Programming languages, little languages, domain-specific languages. Designing the names, concepts, and relationships in APIs. Domain-driven design, jargon, modeling. I thought of myself as more of a writer-y developer than a math-y developer. […]
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