Here's an engineer career hack - when your EM asks you where you want to be ideally in 1 year (3 years) from now: have an answer. A surprising amount of folks do not have an answer, allowing for others to take full control over their story. Don't make that mistake.

Wonderful, clear framing of the director role.

How long does it as usually take a new member of your team to ship code to production? I argue it should be less than 2 weeks. In the upcoming days I'll be posting some practices I've seen working to achieve this.

The best managers/leaders aren't constrained by process. Process is a tool. It can be helpful or harmful. Do the right thing even if it doesn't always look like what the process says. Because if you don't actually know what the right thing is, following process won't save you.

Want to keep your onboarding docs up to date? Entrust the newly onboarding members + their mentors to fix & update them as they go through it. Aside from updating the stale parts, having a fresh pair of eyes point out things that are confusing w/o proper context is invaluable.

A formative experience for me as an engineer was my 1st day in tech. The team had a retrospective in the wake of fixing a nasty bug "Perhaps we should require more PR approvals?" Our manager pointed out that the PR that introduced the bug had 4 approvals. 3 more than required…

Of course not. There's nothing wrong with not having ladders, or not wanting to be in a role on a ladder. Personally, I hate them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As an engineer, the entire leveling and perf review apparatus never did anything but enrage, frustrate and demotivate me. ☺️ However.

FWIW, this kind of ladder has always deeply frustrated me as an engineer, but it's the only approach I've ever seen in practice, possibly because the alternative is too hard to implement with enough objectivity to feel fair without resulting in severe title inflation.

I always find it weird when I come across pockets of resistance towards management. “I don’t need a manager and I frankly find it insulting and demeaning that you think I do”.

After using AWS for ~14 years, I've internalised a handful of design patterns that I try to apply to my own software. I'm keen to know if it's the same for other folks. Roughly: tags, IDs (thrice), limits, pagination. (I'm not going to use the thread emoji)

new little song: "The Re-Org Rag (I'm My Own VP)"

So I haven't said anything about Elon Musk or Twitter because a) I am really trying to allocate my fucks given away from my areas of impotency, and b) the only appropriate commentary is gallows humor, and there are many people much funnier than me on the job.

Nowadays you need to avoid adding emojis on each line of your slides to be contrarian.

As people come to terms with the weight of our new environment, they are slowly beginning to realize how radically things have changed. One area in particular that has changed - the required level of "corporate performance" needed to simply survive (let alone thrive). 🧵

Got my ultimate excuse.

It's a weird time in the tech industry, and weird times can result in calls for sentiments like "urgency" - what does that even mean? And is it even actionable? Some thoughts! blog.danielna.com/urgency-is-a-p…

"Estimating all projects is devilishly difficult, and estimating large projects is virtually impossible. Yet we insist that what hasn't worked for sixty years will definitely work on this next project, if we all just try a little harder. Delusional." world.hey.com/dhh/software-e…

Adult life is when you chicken out at the end of the steam deck purchase flow 3 times, in the end spend the budget on a multi-zone thermostat instead due to your conscience - and are equally excited about them

My loose opinion strongly held is that cargo bikes are underrepresented in zombie apocalypse movies.

Wait, when did Linux get so good at gaming? Trying omarchy on a framework desktop and I'm blown away.