SWLW #531: Cultivating depth and stillness in research, Engineering Maturity Model, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Cultivating Depth and Stillness in Research
13 minutes read.

Andy Matuschak is one of my favorite humans on the internet. While I don't know him personally, I follow every OSS project and writing he's putting out there, as it's deep and fascinating. Andy's tips are helpful if you want to learn to leverage your energy levels to maximize your desired outcome.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

Ways to Combat Notifications
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. I loved the photo, thinking of printing it and hang on my office wall.

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Leading With Confidence: How Engineering Managers Can Avoid Technical Decay
6 minutes read.

Amin Rashidbeigi shares excellent tips when you look for ways to remain technical (enough) as an engineering manager. Reading a lot (mostly on how things work and why they were created), re-doing (for yourself) technical design reviews, and having side projects can help. I gave a talk a few months back on that topic, so feel free to reach out, and I'll share the presentation with you.

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What Differentiates the Highest-Performing Product Teams (Video)
101 minutes read.

This interview with the one and only John Cutler is packed with gems. John is an incredible product thinker and leader, with many blog posts I've shared here at SWLW before. I've listened to it on my commute, and it triggered many ideas I want to experiment with this year.

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Engineering Maturity Model
4 minutes read.

Mike Fisher's maturity levels (layers) are useful as a framework to consider your investment efforts (ratios?): "While I do think of this kind of like a maturity model, they are not stages that one achieves and moves on from. These are areas that one must keep returning to and keep investing in, always from the bottom up."

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Peopleware

Back-to-Back Meetings Create an Illusion of Productivity
5 minutes read.

"The reason I’m concerned about the current meeting overload culture, is the trade-off being proactive and reactive work." -- I very much agree with Jack Turner. It's not that people keep empty schedules but proactively capture time in their calendar to enable certain activities and slack (free time). We can do that while following our energy levels at various times of the day.

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The Onion Theory of Risk (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I love the framing (peel an onion) and the questions used by Marc Andreessen when building a company. You can use most of these questions around risks in an existing company when considering launching a new product to the market. I believe the most significant risk is often the "Distribution Risk."

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GPT-3 Is the Best Journal I’ve Ever Used
7 minutes read.

"It sounds wild and weird, but I think language models can have a productive, supportive role in any personal development practice. [...] You want your journal to feel like an intimate friend that you can confide in—someone who’s seen you in different situations and can reflect back to you what’s important in crucial moments. You want your journal to be personal to you, and the act of journaling to feel fresh and full of hope and possibility every time you do. Unfortunately, paper isn’t great at those things. But GPT-3 is." -- Dan Shipper continues experimenting with generative AI and building various tools to improve his life. It's remarkable how you can play and prompt with GPT-3 and where this can evolve.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@GiladPeleg: Developers spend an enormous amount of time optimizing their work environment (specialized keyboard, custom vim setup...) but a ridiculously low amount of time on how to improve their career trajectory. Is that parkinson's law of triviality?

@NealOGrady: You never learn anything as early as you'd like.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.