A lot of folks want a map to Staff Engineer, and just as many Staff Engineers want to better understand their role. Towards that end, I'm working on a small project to collect folks' stories of reaching and operating as staff-plus engineers staffeng.com

Getting platform engineering teams right is challenging. This is why I was excited to talk with Ganesh Srinivasan, Head of Product & Engineer at Confluent, who built many (platform) teams and organizations at Uber and LinkedIn. We talked... platforms. Main takeaways from our discussion:

In a fast growing company, new engineers (<3 months) often make up more than 25% of the engineering workforce. Onboarding is a key challenge: do it well and your capacity increases. Do it badly, and your capacity decreases with every new hire. What does good look like? 🧵

just experienced the worst customer service ever while taking the Eurostar . #eurostar #neveragain

Here’s a Simple Way to Hold Your Team Accountable by Dave Bailey medium.dave-bailey.com/how-to-hold-yo…

i’m gonna take 3 days off at the end of the year to read 3 books (Mindset carol s., high output management and leading lean software development). Suggestions where I would go to read them? #belgium #saasstartup #proptech

hbr.org/2018/05/the-su…

Should software engineers at all levels lead projects? Any experienced managers know they should answer "it depends" for any yes/no questions. My take is that "it depends, but at better companies, they do." A thread on why and when not just tech leads leading works:

People don’t just leave managers: they leave shitty oncall rotations as well.

When you push the mediocre, they quit When you push the great ones, they step up Tough to get just right

.zapfloor, a workspace management solution platform, secures €2.1M to develop its tool to change how offices are managed in #Europe and the rest of the world. Know more here: bit.ly/3UGaR2D LeanSquare, Wouter Schoofs, Thomas Celen #Funding #WorkspaceManagement

The scariest thing to do as a Founder is to put your product out there. We've spent hours, months, maybe even years working on it. It's beautiful. Perfect.

swimmersjournal.substack.com/p/swimming-in-…

swimmersjournal.substack.com/p/best-swim-of…

Yesterday while we discussed my trip to Ghent, my colleague mentioned an art deco pool near Namur that was converted to be the local library. When losing a pool, I think this is het best thing that can happen, Bibliothèque d'Andenne: 📖 lephare-andenne.be/le-phare-histo… 📸 Florent Marot

"What if we took 2-3 months to rewrite the whole thing? Start from scratch, fix all the mistakes we know about, and we will have a clean state, all our problems solved." There's a divide between engineers who thought about doing this, and those who did it, and it's a big one.

Things you think as a first time founder that just ain’t so: