SWLW #459: The case for ‘Developer Experience’, Accelerating Expertise, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​The Case for ‘Developer Experience’
15 minutes read.

Jean Yang with a wonderful post that made me think about how to build Platform teams and where they should focus: “But I only recently realized the core of what’s holding us back: that most of the conversations around developer experience are about how to make it easier to write new code, in a vacuum… when in reality, most developers are writing new code that needs to play well with old code. This goes beyond the obvious complaints of technical debt, lack of explainability, and other issues. […] What I needed here wasn’t more abstraction, but to embrace the complexity of the software and tech stacks. Seems counterintuitive, given the tailwinds and trends for where software and developer experience have been going (services, no code, more). But in many cases, it’s far more empowering to the developer to help them explore and embrace existing complexity, rather than introduce more complexity when trying to automate things “away.“”

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Culture

How QR Codes Are Made
1 minute read.

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

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Intentional Connection in the Digital Office
3 minutes read.

"The real magic of connections at the office was that we were having these connections without trying. It’s not that they were better, it’s that they were effortless. But they didn’t work for everyone in the same way. They often reinforced status roles and privilege." - I don't know if I agree with Seth Godin's perspective, but it's interesting to think about. To me, what gets worse is not the "effortless connections," but rather the low latency of communication - both verbal and visual aspects. The technical tax makes video calls (or audio) less exciting and fun. "Can you hear me? Now? You're on mute!" or "Zoom fatigue" are real problems. I wonder how much of our lack of intentional connections is due to technical challenges that will eventually be resolved, and maybe enhanced with VR/AR.

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Let's Talk About Accelerating Expertise. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Fascinating thread on how to get people to learn faster. It made me think if I could leverage that to building programs to train engineering managers and technical leaders. The challenge is always in the simulation part (human interactions) and how much of it you can productize somehow.

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The Mentorship Diamond
5 minutes read.

A great way to grow is to be around people who can help you push your limits in areas of interest (where they're the experts). Even better is to find mentors who can devote the time to teach you and help you build shorter feedback loops. Do you have a mentor (or a few)? Do you want to discuss that in your next 1:1 with your manager? Can you help others by mentoring them?

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Peopleware

“Get Off the Floor” and Other Career Advice From Microsoft, Looker, Reddit & Twitter
14 minutes read.

"Don’t ship your org chart is a common saying. But this is incorrect — you should be shipping your org chart to make sure it maps to whatever product or objective the business is trying to achieve." -- Nick Caldwell shares many helpful tips I enjoyed and learned from his experience at big companies such as Microsoft and smaller startups like Reddit, Looker, and Twitter.

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Slow Tests Can and Do Result in Production Outages. Don’t Believe Me? Here’s How… (Thread)
3 minutes read.

A short thread that I'd share with your teammates. Having good tests (and alerts) hygiene is easy to ignore but extremely costly to fix if left unattended: "If changes are getting too large to easily understand, you can and will have production outages as a result of batched changes that would almost certainly have been identified as problematic if they had been made on their own."

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How Many People Can Someone Lead?
5 minutes read.

Pat Kua with helpful insights when considering how to structure the team in terms of size, based on the experience of your leaders and teammates. Use it as a sanity check to verify that people invest enough of their time in the right places and align expectations early on.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@BarrettABrooks: Haruki Murakami has a popular quote, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” The key is “only.” Reading what others are reading gives valuable insight into what they are thinking and creates social connection

@anjuan: I've measured "engineering velocity" for a very long time, but I'm starting to focus more on "engineering drag". These are the things that slow down engineering teams. This includes product discovery, local dev environments, CI/CD pipelines, etc. Reduce drag to go faster.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.