Ideas on deciding what to speak or write about Whenever I read an article, or watch a talk, I ask myself: why are you telling me this? Why not anybody else? What makes you the best person — ideally in the world — to tell the story that you’re telling? In
Most companies have some rules or guidelines in place for whenever an “incident” happens, be it an outage or something else that impacts customers. Some companies call them incident reports, others root cause analyses. Sadly, too often, producing these types of reports is seen as a chore — essentially punishment for
If you’re afraid I’m about to get all “Mindful” on you — no worries. If you want to dive into that topic, talk to my brother. No, I’m about get all grandpa on you. Warning: Rant alert. I’ve noticed something. I noticed it again today at the
There’s two common “w” questions around serverless: the first one is “WHAT IS IT?” because, if you’re anything like me, your first response to this term was that it sounded more like link-bait than actual technology. I’ll get to my definition of serverless in a bit (because
Hi, and welcome to my team, I’m happy you are here. Since every manager has a different view on what this job entails, I thought I’d write down my approach to the role, so you will have a better idea what to expect and what not to expect
Contrary to popular belief, management isn’t all roses. At the top of my list of least favorite parts is people quitting on me. That’s right, this does happen. Luckily not a lot, but given enough time and scale, this will happen to every manager at some point. This
It’s all about the journey I failed my first Math test in school. I failed it, even though most of my answers were correct. “How much is 1820 divided by 5?” “364” I answered. 1 point out of a possible 5. Why? I didn’t show my work. In
A few months ago a new engineer joined our team. As always I spent some time with him to better understand the type of person he is, what drives him. We usually talk about past experience, but more importantly: future goals. As it turned out, he had an interesting one:
Or: why is nobody listening to me!? Does this sound familiar? “They just do whatever they want.” “They don’t listen to our suggestions, whatever we try.” “Whatever they say goes.” “They talk as we’re not even here.” “They micro manage us all the time, we get to make
Scheduling meetings with people, especially larger groups, by default is a hostile act. You come in and take away half an hour, an hour or more of people’s time—time they could otherwise have spent doing “real work.” On top of the meeting time itself, there’s additional overhead:
Three techniques to constantly keep moving forward The best teams I’ve worked with in my career share one thing in common: they’re very disciplined about improving themselves (as people and as a team), how they work (process), and their environment (the other parts of the organization they work
Once upon a time, a team got into a cycle of putting out fires that escalated to a point where productivity practically grind to a halt. When one issue was fixed, another popped up. It was like a game of whack-a-mole. It never stopped. This team had been in this
