A Place for Poor Examples

Why AI Won’t Replace the Human Touch in Performance Reviews Performance reviews are a perennial headache in many organizations - often seen as bureaucratic, time‐consuming, and stressful for managers and employees alike.

A career development plan is a structured approach to professional growth.

Onboarding Engineers with Mentorship Pods When you’re a small team, pairing each new hire 1:1 works great—but as you grow, that model becomes overwhelming.

A Pragmatic Framework for Technical Debt We’ve all faced the dilemma: should we rush a quick feature out the door, or spend extra time refactoring code?

Blameless Postmortems: Turning Failures into Learning When something breaks in production—maybe a server crashes or a deployment goes sideways—it’s tempting to point fingers and hunt for the person “at fault.”

Structuring an On-Call Rotation: A Guide for Engineering Managers On-call rotations are more than “who picks up the phone”—they’re a critical way to balance incident response, customer support, and operational health without burning out your team.

In the software development world, teams often face the dilemma of whether to build a tool in-house or purchase an existing solution.

Purpose The primary purpose of one-on-one meetings is to give your reports a chance to discuss issues and topics that they find important.

Background In my current role, I inherited an older codebase where best practices were often overlooked.

In the realm of incident management, accurate and swift communication is vital.

Introduction Technical debt is a common challenge faced by engineering teams, requiring deliberate efforts to manage and pay it down.

Crunch periods are a reality in many industries, and sometimes they are necessary to meet an immovable deadline.

As a manager, you’re responsible for ensuring that the software your team creates is of the highest quality possible.

When it comes to software engineering roles, experience in the tech stack you’re going to be working in is valuable but not specifically required.

I was speaking to a friend who works at a startup with a team of around 14 engineers. 80% of them are mid level engineers with 3-4 years of experience.

Engineering Leadership Principles The article “Engineering Leadership Principles” by Hugo Dias outlines six principles that he believes are crucial for effective engineering leadership: Build trust through transparency and communication Foster a culture of

Note: This is a proposal I put together with one of the engineers in my organization for a peer-directed mentorship program.

Note: This is a compliment to the previous article I wrote about the Technical state of a Team, and explains the concepts in depth.

All the previous project planning articles summarized into a checklist.

Note: This is a series of project planning talks I gave my team.

Note: this is an expansion on a previous article I wrote around kickoff docs.

Note: This is a series of project planning talks I gave my team.

Note: This is a series of project planning talks I gave my team.

Note: This was a series of talks I gave to leadership in my organization, so some of the comments here might not make sense in the context of a blog post.

Note: This was a series of talks I gave to leadership in my organization, so some of the comments here might not make sense in the context of a blog post.

Note: This was a series of talks I gave to leadership in my organization, so some of the comments here might not make sense in the context of a blog post.

Note: This was a series of talks I gave to leadership in my organization, so some of the comments here might not make sense in the context of a blog post.

Setting Goals Two of the more popular methods for setting goals are SMART and CLEAR: SMART Goals This method helps ensure that the goals have been thoroughly vetted.

Overview In re-reading High Output Management recently, I was particularly interested in reading over Andy Grove’s schedule and seeing how he spent his time.

I was reviewing an old incident review doc where I wrote up some of the high level learnings from the incident.

Some thoughts on how you could evaluate the state of the systems your team owns.

Velocity is a commonly used metric in development teams to measure how much work they can fit into a sprint.

This is based off a talk I gave on improving communications.

Back when we were all the office together, it was pretty easy as a manager to get a feel for how the team was doing.

What is a Project Kickoff?

Backlog Grooming Some thoughts on how you could evaluate the state of your backlog.

I use SCQA all the time in my communications both up to leadership and down to my teams.

Some further classes I recommend for potential new engineering managers. https://www.harrisonmetal.com/library/objectives-key-results So many companies want to set up goals in the OKR (Objective-Key Result) format.

More Shared Knowledge on Projects Include more people in code reviews even if they’re not actively picking up development tasks – this shares out knowledge of the changes and gets another set of eyes that can ask good questions Break team silos, share kno…

A couple of EM conferences folks might find useful: SFELC Summit An annual celebration for engineering leaders.

Wanted to share the results of the work we’ve been doing to improve performance and stabilize our ES cluster.

If you’re looking for moment.js alternatives, I’d recommend reading this article about smaller, lighter-weight moment.js alternatives.

A friend recently introduced me to the ideas of creating a Manager README.

Wanted to share some insights my team has found with changing sharding strategies for ElasticSearch (ES).

Two classes I recommend for potential new engineering managers. https://www.harrisonmetal.com/classes/foundations-general-management The course is designed to help new managers develop foundational skills in management and leadership.

Seeing high garbage collection with ElasticSearch?

Was doing some test speedup/performance improvement work recently on the search API and found out something; the moment.js library takes around 100 microseconds (or .1 milliseconds) to create a new instance.

My team at work recently upgraded our codebase to use to node 6.9, as node 6 has recently gone to LTS.

Superagent/Request Memory Leaks The last several weeks Thomas Hunter and myself have spent some of our nights and weekends trying to track down memory leaks in an API we both work on.

Pun in title intentional I upgraded a heap of projects I was working on to node 4.2.3 and babel 6.