Elided Branches

As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle.

Several years ago, I published a critique of manager READMEs that succeeded in stirring up a lot of feelings, pro and con.

I’m working on a talk about rewriting platforms for LDX3 later this month.

On March 26, 2015, I posted a short blog post to the Rent the Runway engineering blog, Sharing Our Engineering Ladder, with a quick intro to the RTR engineering career ladder and links to both spreadsheet and long-text versions.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” — Eliel Saarinen Frequently we will be given problems to solve by other people.

Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today.

Software engineers are attracted to formulas, algorithms, and structures.

Most companies have carefully created separate senior career tracks that provide details of the differences between being a manager and being an individual contributor (IC).

For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.

originally posted on LeadDev.com One of the most stressful parts of the end-of-year process for managers is the dreaded performance rating.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of Choose Boring Technology.

This tweet got me thinking about change, and how software engineers (and especially, Platform teams) can drive cultural change throughout companies.

Have you ever worked on a team that felt like it was just stuck in a rut?

For the past 3 years, I have been running a platform engineering organization.

A hard lesson for me over the past several years of my career has been figuring out how to pick my battles.

I got feisty on twitter this week and wrote up some tweets on manager READMEs, a recent hot trend in management.

When I wrote “The Manager’s Path” I talked about what it means to work at the various levels of leadership, but I didn’t really talk as much about how you actually climb to those levels.

I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers.

Effective delegation is one of the most critical skills a manager can learn.

Alignment, in the teamwork sense, means “a position of agreement or alliance.”

I have a bad habit.

*May also apply to senior ICs Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called “How do Individual Contributors Get Stuck?”

Occasionally, you may be asked to give constructive feedback on your peers, perhaps as part of review season.

When I worked in finance ages ago, there was a system used by many (but not me!)

I have agreed to give a guest lecture for a class at Yale, and they’ve asked me to speak about “building and motivating engineering teams” from the perspective of a smaller startup.