SWLW #442: The great online game, Grow the puzzle around you, and more.

Heya,

I hope that you and your family are doing well, and you are able to find a new rhythm in this hard situation.

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

This Week's Favorite

​​The Great Online Game
9 minutes read.

I used to think that I need to quit everything if I wanted to play with my ideas. I have dozens of those every year, so FOMO is hard. Playing the Online Game on Twitter and in my newsletter, talking with people over email, has been a fantastic boost to my career. It opened up discussions and opportunities with people I respect. The best of it all - I can play and experiment without dropping it all - I love working at Forter as VP Engineering, and I love working on my side projects as a writer and maker. I'm trying to provide value to a group of people in a niche that feels like playing to me (versus hard work to others), and this is how you can start the game. It takes years, but it compounds.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Product [sponsored]

Guide to Effective Feature Management [O'Reilly]
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Culture

Rare Video of Distributed Consensus Algorithm at Work
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Grow the Puzzle Around You
9 minutes read.

I enjoyed reading Jessica Livingston's post as it can inspire many to start a side project or a company, and surround themselves with people to complement their strengths: "So if you want to start a startup, I recommend you try asking yourself what's distinctive about you. What unique combination of abilities and interests do you have? And don't edit your answers, because as my example shows, the most unlikely ingredients could be the key to the recipe."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Founding vs Inheriting
7 minutes read.

Balaji Srinivasan with another epic post (worth following on Twitter), with my favorite framing around "Read-Only Culture". You can repeat the process, but you cannot build it from scratch (or change it) as you don't know or understand the fundamentals.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Career Development: What It Really Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP
5 minutes read.

I like the distinction Dave Kellogg is making on the role of a Manager vs. Director vs. VP. This is an important lesson to remember if you're considering taking the VP route: "Part of truly operating at the VP level is to internalize this fact. You are accountable for results. Make a plan that you believe in. Because if the plan doesn’t work, you can’t hide behind approval. Your job was to make a plan that worked. If the risk of dying on a hill is inevitable, you may as well die on your own hill, and not someone else’s."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Jobs [sponsored]

Tech Lead Developer - Full Stack (m/f/x) @ Ecosia  (Berlin)
Ecosia - the search engine that plants trees, is one of the world's largest social business. You will influence the technical direction of your team in close collaboration with the product manager and you will be contributing code as well.

Senior Developer Evangelist @ Pluralsight (Remote - USA)
Pluralsight is building a team of developer evangelists to engage the broad developer community. If you love learning and love to talk, write and speak about code, this is the job for you.

Engineering Manager (f/m/x) @ Ecosia (Berlin)
You help grow the engineering organisation as a hiring manager and by strengthening our collaborative and inclusive culture. This is your opportunity to become part of a supportive, cross-functional team and shape a product used by millions of users!
 

 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

Beware of Tight Feedback Loops
7 minutes read.

This is such an important insight: "after achieving proficiency in a field, tight feedback loops are useless. That’s because initially, the learning environment is gentle. The path is well-travelled, there are easily accessible guides, things work according to common sense. As we become proficient, the environment becomes harsher, with noisier feedback. Improving is not as easy. At higher levels of skill, further progression depends on self-learning, on discovering or inventing new practices and knowledge. As skill increases, the gap between optimizing for metrics and optimizing for mastery widens." -- It made me think about many areas in my life and the feedback loops I have there.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Engineer by Day, Venture Capitalist by Night
9 minutes read.

What an incredible read by Casey Caruso, sharing her journey with great frameworks on time management and reflecting on her progress (check out the "Reflections" section). What an inspiration.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Why Your One-On-One’s Should Probably Be Longer
5 minutes read.

I like this advice by Don Neufeld. Sometimes it's hard to achieve a day of 1:1s as others have their own agenda, but I believe that 45 minutes sessions batched into a day is a good idea. I prefer to have them once every couple of weeks, with status meetings on big projects where needed. This is important to remember: "The point is, if you schedule short meetings, you optimize for short topics, and often that means big topics don’t get time at all."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@jcsrb: 6 hours of debugging can save you 5 minutes of reading documentation

@rakyll: The biggest perception problem in our industry is, as an IC, you grow up to be an architect who design systems. No. There are very senior people whose job is only to maintain very critical tools and libraries that doesn't require much system design work.



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 and my work by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.