tag
Productivity
- #102 7 min
Meeting notes lose value the moment you finish writing them—and it’s time to fix that
I like to be prepared in meetings. In some ways it’s probably an innate part of my personality, but it also became more important to me as my role has changed throughout my career. In particular, the first time I became an engineering manager is when I started to become a more diligent notetaker and meeting preparer. I think this is largely because my job shifted from being output-centric to more people- and meeting-centric. I still took notes and prepared when I was a software engineer, but it was for a very different context and purpose. As an engineer, my work centered around code output. As a manager, my work instead centered around coordinating, following up, and supporting my team. If you’ve never worked as a manager before, this probably just sounds like paper-pushing, but it’s actually a lot of work—and important! The work product is just different from that of an individual contributor.
- #99 5 min
We suck at meetings
I’ve worked as a software engineer, manager, consultant, and business owner. All of these jobs have involved meetings. What those meetings look like has varied greatly. As an engineer, meetings typically entailed technical conversations with peers, one-on-ones with managers, and planning meetings or demos with stakeholders. As a manager, these looked more like quarterly goal-setting with engineering leadership, one-on-ones with direct reports, and decision-making discussions with the team. As a consultant, my day often consists of talking to clients to provide input and guidance, communicating with partners to develop leads and strategize on accounts, and meeting with sales prospects to land new deals.
- #77 20 min
Scaling DevOps and the Revival of Operations
Operations is going through a renaissance right now. With the move to cloud, the increasing amount of automation, and the increasing importance of automation, Ops as we know it is reinventing itself out of necessity. Infrastructure is becoming more and more sophisticated—and commoditized—and practices are just now starting to grow up around that. So while some worry about robots taking our jobs, the reality is more about how automation will help augment us to build better software and focus on higher-value things. It’s not so much about the distant future—whatever that may hold—so much as it is about the next five to ten years, what Operations looks like in that timeframe, and why I think it has to retool.
- #76 5 min
More Environments Will Not Make Things Easier
Microservices are hard. They require extreme discipline. They require a lot more upfront thinking. They introduce integration challenges and complexity that you otherwise wouldn’t have with a monolith, but service-oriented design is an important part of scaling organization structure. Hundreds of engineers all working on the same codebase will only lead to angst and the inability to be nimble. This requires a pretty significant change in the way we think about things. We’re creatures of habit, so if we’re not careful, we’ll just keep on applying the same practices we used before we did services. And that will end in frustration.
- #61 6 min
The Future of Ops
Traditional Operations isn’t going away, it’s just retooling. The move from on-premise to cloud means Ops, in the classical sense, is largely being outsourced to cloud providers. This is the buzzword-compliant NoOps movement, of which many call the “successor” to DevOps, though that word has become pretty diluted these days. What this leaves is a thin but crucial slice between Amazon and the products built by development teams, encompassing infrastructure automation, deployment automation, configuration management, log management, and monitoring and instrumentation.