Key results must be outcomes — meaningful measures of human behavior that tell us we’ve delivered value. As a leader your job is to approve your teams’ key results. However, if OKRs are to succeed then your job is no longer to prescribe solutions for your teams. That’s th...

PDPs and similar initiatives are dismissed as box-ticking exercises. People are tired of being told to come up with SMART goals, we need to dig deeper, and actually think about what is motivating to people, rather than trying to influence behaviours via bureaucratic form filling.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-07, with 47 words.

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12 strategies managers can use to support their team and prevent burnout. One of his standout strategies that I doubt rarely gets put into use is reduce the number of hours worked by agreeing to reduce effort Identifying burnout in a remote environment is more difficult ...

Google concluded that Psychological Safety was the Number One factor in determining the effectiveness of a team. In a Psychologically Safe team, people feel safe taking risks, and sharing their vulnerability.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-07, with 33 words.

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Unlike regular features and bug fixes, the refactoring process yields little to no visible and measurable changes on the front end, and management cannot keep track of the progress on their own. It’s important to establish transparent communication to keep the management and other project stakeholders updated on the refactoring progress and results.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-07, with 55 words.

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what could be better. Information / context is where I spend a lot of time for new hires, or someone taking on new responsibility. E.g. if I have a new lead, they might have questions about how things work or what they share about how they think things are going will surface things they may be missing or need to pay more attention to.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-07, with 66 words.

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Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-07, with 17 words.

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it’s not an “exit interview”, it’s your final one-on-one. If you’ve built a solid relationship with this person, they’ll regularly be bringing problems and even criticism into your 1:1s. If you’ve demonstrated a track record of making it safe to do that, this final meetin...

It may seem redundant to do this against a file that already lives in version control elsewhere - but in addition to tracking changes, Git scraping can offfer a cheap and easy way to add automation that triggers when a change is detected. I need an actionable alert any ti...

Weird article about dev productivity and basically using scrum velocity and burn downs (which can be gamed easily) and then small pods and individual ownership. Not sure how sustainable this is. Give the team a scope, a North Star, some direction and space to explore and ex...

Accept that the team knows more than you The first step is to accept that you don’t know anything about this existing team’s domain. Next, remember what your job is. Your job is to help guide people to make better decisions, learn fast, and achieve goals. Not contribute c...

Really like this idea of self-reflection, but I would argue that it isn’t about not having time its just a priority call. I haven’t been out running for quite some time now, I have prioritised work and family. Inspecting and adapting is key, and this post comes as a remind...

the ability to proxy DNS wildcard records. Previously, this feature was only available to our Enterprise customers. After many of our free and pay-as-you-go users reached out, we decided that this feature should be available to everyone.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-06, with 39 words.

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Hence its decision to require 2FA “by the end of 2023” for users who commit code, open or merge pull requests, use Actions, or publish packages.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-05, with 28 words.

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Rather than link them all up separately

• BDD is like TDD if
• The lady in the taxi - a parable of metrics
• Goal-oriented vocabulary - saying what you mean
• Monkey business value

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-03, with 38 words.

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Early employees often juggle responsibilities that span many different departments in larger companies. According to Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeffrey Bussgang, having loosely-defined roles enables small teams to get more done and try more things while they ...

You’re not learning (and you want to be). You’re learning coping mechanisms rather than skills. You feel morally conflicted about hiring. Your job is affecting your confidence. Your job is affecting you physically.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 35 words.

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Hofstadter’s law states that it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law Parkinson’s law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Conway’s Law states that organizations, who design systems, a...

Finally. Starting in late 2022, users will be able to either email EPUB files to their device or use one of the Send to Kindle apps to get EPUB ebooks onto their Amazon e-readers. The Kindle still can’t natively load EPUB files, so connecting the e-reader to a computer a...

explore the four paths I’ve seen most engineers take to become senior engineers. Along the way, I’ll share some of the skills and benchmarks you might need to hit to get there yourself.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 35 words.

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Being a tech lead in an empowered product team is not a purely technical role. In addition to your typical engineering duties, you are a part of the product manager/tech lead/product designer trifecta and you collaborate on product decisions.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 41 words.

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Rule one is scarily simple. You will never change anyone’s mind on a matter of opinion.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 18 words.

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Cynefin, created by Dave Snowden in 1999, is a decision-making framework for working with complex systems. Cynefin—named after the Welsh word for “habitat”—is designed to assist decision making by applying decisions to domains. This domain structure allows decision makers...

DevOps principles help in managing environments and enable organizations to succeed in aligning their teams about processes, tools, and responsibilities. In the last few years, usage of the term “DevOps Culture” has grown a lot, in opposite to tool-only DevOps implementations.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 43 words.

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important factors you should consider when architecting systems that are powered by third-party systems. The factors I detail are:

• deployment model
• technology coherence
• NFRs and SLAs
• Infrastructure and hardware needs
• API style and documentation
• Idempotent APIs
• Getting data out of the third party provider
• Community

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 49 words.

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I’ve been meaning to write about individual READMEs and “user manuals” for quite some time and I’m glad that I held off. It was recently brought back to my attention through Ed Batista’s post: To README or not to README. Ed’s been on a tear of good posts lately and I’d highly recommend checking out his blog.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 59 words.

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Remote work offers the opportunity to rethink work from first principles and ask ourselves: What does life look like when our jobs work for us, rather than the other way around? When you don’t have to commute, when no one is watching you work, when code shipped at 2 am is...

When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly train a person to have knowledge in some domain, but I’ve never seen raw coding abilit...

The existence of clear, achievable, challenging, and valuable objectives and key results (OKR) with Scrum are points for planning iterations and deliveries, in defining tasks for execution. Companies must have as key objectives and results that are consolidated in the intersection of business and technology, of the necessary with the possible, of the customer, leaders, and teams.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 59 words.

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Individually, engineering managers and ICs cared about career growth but the conversation around growth was unclear and at times uneven. We didn’t have a common language and without a shared understanding of growth, misunderstanding and bias would eventually be inevitable.

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// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2022-05-02, with 42 words.

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