Skills that make a big difference

While empathy is touted as a critical leadership skill, one that helps influence others in organizations, it is critical for engineers too. Empathy allows us to better understand our customers, stakeholders, and team members.

Free up valuable developer time with Internal, the all-in-one internal tools platform (sponsor)

Internal is the all-in-one platform for building internal tools such as workflows, automations, apps, and task systems – on top of databases and APIs. Internal combines an easy-to-use interface with advanced customization capabilities and developer tools. It’s the only platform where technical teams can share the workload with non-technical teams to build complex tools and save engineering time.

Investing Wisely in Architecture Through Refactoring

We tend to use guidelines about design and architecture as protection against under-investing in design. This choice tends naturally to lead to a certain amount of over-investing in design before finding a helpful balance.

Setting engineering org values

Stated values possess no magic for cultural transformation, but with a bit of care they can be useful for consolidating cultural change that you’ve already made. In my experience, company and organizational value statements are both overused and underused, and it’s useful to dig into how to incorporate them.

Leading With Confidence: How Engineering Managers Can Avoid Technical Decay

An exploration of ways to improve low-level engineering skills and maintain effectiveness.

Traps that could derail your replatforming project

We recently replatformed at MPB. I couldn’t help thinking back to similar projects I’ve been involved with in the past.

Focus time for developers and everybody else

Everybody knows that focus time is important especially for individual contributor levels. But also in a management role I value focus time a lot for strategic work, research, analysis, and sometimes even just to be able to process all input and reflect on what the current state and bigger picture are.