Mitchell Hashimoto, Contributing to Complex Projects:

The first step to understanding the internals of any project is to become a user of the project. You do not have to become an expert user, but my personal graduation criteria for this step is to try to build something real using the project, even if it is small or simple.

Analog: here’s a functional area. Set it up for yourself or on your localhost. Now, make a small, well-contained change.

Learn how to build the project and get a working binary (or equivalent). Don’t bother with understanding the build system, the dependencies, etc. Just cargo cult guides, websites, whatever you need to reliably and repeatedly go from source code to runnable binary on your system.

Analog: get to the point you can run the app, run (focused) tests, and see changes in the app. Then start trying to make functional changes.

To learn the internals, I like to use an approach I call “trace down, learn up.”

Analog: for your first several changes, read from the top of the call stack down as far as you can. Don’t try to make changes, but do try to note all the landmarks (files) you visit and how they relate to each other. Note “side quests” to investigate later as you go.

Don’t be afraid of complexity. I think too many engineers look at stereotypically complex projects such as programming languages, browsers, databases, etc. as magic or as destined for higher-beings. I like to remember that all projects were started by other humans. If they could do it, I can do it too. And so can you.

You, too, can gain enough understanding of an eight-year-old system to work on it as though you were around when some of it was written. In fact, your effort will compound: the longer you’re around, the more you will find curious code that, it turns out, you added in the first place. 😆

Perspective is the lens we view our world, work, relationships, etc. All the luck, resources, or knowledge in the world are wasted without good perspective. If we’re talking about life like it’s a role playing game character sheet, you want to have a good perspective stat/multiplier.

Some clever tricks:

• keep the mind open and flexible to other perspectives; seek them out
• practice at holding many perspectives simultaneously
• know the limitations and strengths of a perspective as you navigate the world
• know when your default perspective makes a scenario more difficult and how to fall back to a perspective you still believe in
• get out of routines periodically and see if it changes how you see things
• more so, get out of your bubble; see people of a different background live their lives, reflect on what factors brought them there and how factors are different/similar for your life
• even more so, travel outside your city/state/country; axiomatically the people most different from you live in a place far away
  

It’s often tough to gain perspective. Most of the defaults in life steer us away from insight. School, cliques, work, even typical travel nudge us toward seeing familiar things with similar people who live similar lives. I’m by no means an expert at breaking out of these ruts. I’m pretty enamored with my routines. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clever trick to offer here.

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Julian Shapiro, What you should be working on:

What is admirable is periodically killing your momentum to ask, Should I still be doing this?

Michael Lopp, The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well:

Let others change your mind. There are more of them than you. The size of your team’s network is collectively larger than yours, so it stands to reason they have more information. Listen to that information and let others change your perspective and your decisions. Augment your obvious and non-obvious weaknesses by building a diverse team. It’s choosing the path of least resistance to build a team full of humans who agree with you. Ideas don’t get better with agreement. Ideas gather their strength with healthy discord, and that means finding and hiring humans who represent the widest possible spread of perspective and experience. Delegate more than is comfortable. The complete delegation of work to someone else on the team is a vote of confidence in their ability, which is one essential way that trust forms within a team. Letting go of doing the work is tricky, but the manager’s job isn’t doing quality work, it’s building a healthy team that does quality work at scale.

Be like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible

Former president Obama perfectly explains why he was so committed to reading during his presidency in a recent New York Times interview (paywall): “At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”

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. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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 in the world, and still struggle to convey your message or find the right audience.

First off, writing is hard so writing about software is hard too. Developing our thoughts beyond “that sounded nice in the shower” is hard but rewarding work.

It’s difficult to translate “this worked” out of the system of people, circumstances, and goals. As noted above, at one scale everything works, at another basically nothing works.

No advice on software development is universal. From the smallest coding details to how we structure our multi-person/week projects, there are no best practices. There’s only “this worked/failed for us when building this particular project”.

Writing about software leadership ends up being a lot of describing the people and scenarios that led to a successful approach. The trick is that getting down to particulars about people and scenarios is either too personal to share on the internet or too specific/proprietary to make sense outside a specific organization. It’s hard to write high-quality leadership ideas without drowning in setup, hedging, or over-generic characters.

It’s tempting but insufficient to suggest “act as a good person would and most things will work out”. Merely acting as a good person does will not get me out of situations where individual best intentions created bad outcomes. Perhaps specifying what a good person does with enough clarity that another person can apply and/or emulate it is a laudable step.

In practice, it seems better to say “act as a good person 95% of the time but do the minimally jerk-y thing 5% of the time to cut Gordian knots created by good intention”. I’m not happy with that trade-off, but it does seem like a necessary part of leading people. I build context so I can trade accumulated trust for impact when the situation requires it. (Hopefully! I often don’t know if I was spending from a surplus or deficit of trust until much later.)

1. When in doubt, measure. Twice!
2. For ad-hoc/napkin estimates, I use Benchmark.ms { …the code… } to size up the performance of Ruby code.
3. 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, thanks Evan!
4. When it comes to code that interacts with databases (Postgres, ElasticSearch, HTTP APIs, Redis, etc.) it is almost always the case that one big query is far faster than queries inside a loop (e.g., N+1 queries)
5. Ruby performance is often limited by creating many objects and the time it takes for the garbage collector to find/free them up afterwards. This is sometimes not the case in recent Ruby versions (see #1).
   

Bonus useful tools:

• bumbler – profile loading gems from your Gemfile at application boot. In most Rails apps, there are several seconds of savings to find in lazy loading rarely loaded libraries.
• active-record-query-trace: shows the call-site and last few stack frames for every query in your development log. Super handy for “where is this blasted query coming from?”

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 works without him, and as a team member he softens conflict and bridges divides.

More teams need Ringo(s), those who make it work without soaking up emotional energy.

Managers who think that building esprit de corps requires a separate activity from work—here-comes-the-fun time, set aside for axe-throwing or gif battles or something equally ghastly—are missing a fundamental point. The highest-performing teams derive the greatest satisfaction not from each other, but from the work they do together.

The Beatles weren’t excellent due to vacationing together in India. They were exceptional because of what they built together, both because of and sometimes despite each other. So it goes with teams.

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 🤔) and Rubinius’ implementation of Enumerable in Ruby.

(The reference is from The Colbert Report, which is a fun-but-dated thing to know.)