Stories I’ve enjoyed this weekHow many direct reports should a manager have? (13 minute read) A very good article on how many direct reports a manager has. And with quite some insights and some deciding factors. I’d say 5. Boink. There you have it. Not scientific. But I do think five people is the amount of people you can support in their development and if you have management team meetings discussing topics, 6 (5 + you) is a manageable size. But still, go read the article. https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/how-many-direct-reports-should-a 🦄 11 years of SaaS product strategy (12 minute read) Pure gold. “All of a sudden you’ll find that all the really obvious stuff has been built. Suddenly prioritisation goes from being really easy, to really hard.”. Too many of the startups I talk with have no idea about strategy or strategy progression like in the article. https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/11-years-of-saas-product-strategy Going faster by duplicating code (12 minute read) You’re probably still a coder and this is really interesting I think, though useless to most. But to me more interesting than the newest React features. https://voidstar.tech/code_duplication/ 💌 The Poignant Email Steve Jobs Wrote To Himself A Year Before He Died (4 minute read) Yes. https://officechai.com/stories/steve-jobs-email-to-self/ Test drive all the programming fonts! (928 minute read) For 40 years I’ve played around with programming fonts (well not quite, there was very little choice on 8bit systems, but I already with Amiga Assemblers there was the font question). And for 40 years I thought it was some form of vanity. Then I found Berkeley Mono and it really is easier to read. https://www.programmingfonts.org/ Too many managers insist on push. The want status meetings, they want email status reports. Then they have no time left for their work. Think more about pull. If you want the status, ask for it (and most of the time, you don’t want it - I get it you’re curious and insecure, and have a feeling you need to control things - just don’t). Then you have more time to do work that is useful. https://kellanem.com/notes/push-and-pull 🐎 Lazarus luring employees with trojanized coding challenges: The case of a Spanish aerospace company (9 minute read) Your employees take a coding challenge for a new job. On your computer. Not only is your employee going to leave, your company infected by ransomware. Double whammy. After reading this as CTO, next day I’d make it clear to everyone that taking coding challenges on company hardware is not ok. And they should be aware of this attack vector. On the other hand, if developers in your org do this, I’d like to see your recruiting criteria. Question: Is there a way to run gop in watch mode?#1424 (5 minute read) Someone (me!) asked about a feature for an open source project. Implemented next day. How long would this take in your product development organization? https://github.com/goplus/gop/issues/1424 The Musk Algorithm (18 minute read) My personal feelings aside, some great insights. Must read. https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-musk-algorithm-977bf312 Kafka As An Antipattern (12 minute read) Use Kafka if you need it. Most people don’t need it. Most people who use it have no clue what it is. https://joshaustin.tech/blog/kafka-as-an-antipattern/ Never thought about that nuance of https://testing.googleblog.com/2023/09/else-nuances.html Unpacking Elixir: Resilience (11 minute read) We do not focus enough on resilience in our designs. They are too fragile. If your system is resilient, you can sleep better, no more incidents at night. The article is an example for Elixir, but every system can be designed more resilient. Every code path can be written more resilient. Two things stop developers doing this: 1.) Knowledge 2.) Sprint business pressure to cut corners (Still on Scrum?) Join the CTO newsletter! | |
