https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/yagni-exceptions/
🆚 Product v [editor: vs.?] Engineering
I make many of these points, E.g. “Finger pointing across functions” for a decade, and argue against the “vs” of Product and Engineering. You’re a CTO? Own product! Now Martin Fowler says this (not the “Own product” part). I thought I was avant-garde. But he’s not yet completely there, so I’m still ahead.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/03-product-v-engineering.html
Photoshop for text
The article has a great idea: Photoshop has a dozen tools to manipulate your images, contrast, saturation, or sharpness. Text editors can’t do any of that. Great ideas are those that are obvious in retrospect. What amount of time does your department set aside for thinking about game-changing ideas, dear CTO?
https://stephanango.com/photoshop-for-text
Technology Choices For My SaaS In Retrospect
Radical simplicity. In F# this time.
https://thomasbandt.com/technology-choices-in-retrospect
How boring should your team’s codebases be
Very boring is my point. Fun and challenge should come from deep features and novel data structures, not from challenging code bases. This article makes some observations on what is boring.
https://blog.meadsteve.dev/team-work/2022/10/13/how-boring-should-your-teams-codebases-be/
Building a resilient system: Our journey to observability at Intercom
I recently wrote about how self-healing code saves the CTO time so this was interesting. The article is a deep dive into migrating from ops metrics to tracing for better insights and coming with that better reliability.
https://www.intercom.com/blog/engineering-observability/
Should I create a Performance Improvement Plan for my direct report?
Ah, the dreaded PIP. One of the core tools at eBay for “under-performing” people. I wasn’t a fan of PIPs, they always seemed to be too-little-too-late, and seemed like I had screwed up as a manager before. But even for me, the article had some good points and ideas on how to deal with this - for everyone - a bad situation and make it better. If you struggle - currently! - with an underperforming direct report, there might be some help for both of you.
https://larahogan.me/blog/performance-improvement-plans/
🚩 When Is Short Tenure a Red Flag?
I’m not hiring job hoppers. They are just not worth it (mostly, there might be exceptions if you’re in a crisis and need help and expert knowledge ASAP). They need 3+ months to get productive and in the last 3 months they focus on interviewing and their new job. So from 12 months at most, you get 6 productive months. I’m not hiring job hoppers. This article though goes into more good detail like “Under 1 year should be considered “short” [agree!]. 2-3 years is normal and shouldn’t be considered “short”, except for very senior leadership roles – more on that below.”
https://jacobian.org/2022/oct/14/when-is-short-tenure-a-red-flag/
Why we’re moving away from Firebase
I thought I put in a technical article to not be to meta (Not Meta!). As I see several marketing departments pressure technology to adopt Firebase because of GA4, I’ve chosen that one.
https://koptional.com/article/why-we%E2%80%99re-moving-away-from-firebase
You should not be using AWS. Probably.
I fear this becomes an anti-cloud newsletter, WHICH IT ISN’T! But this was too good to not include.
https://www.karlsutt.com/articles/you-should-not-be-using-aws/