Leaving a company is like attending your own funeral — people say the nicest things about you. Just a little late. I was laid off yesterday. I had hoped the lay-off epidemic sweeping across the industry right now would pass by Mattermost, but it didn’t, and I’m one of
“If you treat me like a boss, we will struggle. If you treat my like a colleague, we can do great things together.” Boy, do I wish I was quoting myself here, but I’m not. This is a quote attributed to somebody in my team who said it — so
No More
I get my best ideas while taking showers or taking walks. If you feel you don’t get enough great ideas, start taking showers. People around you will appreciate it for other reasons as well. And take walks too. Exercise you know. However, contrary to what you may have assumed
Some time ago I wrote about the challenge to turn punch holes into dynamic islands. A fun subset of this problem space is to frame tasks that may appear as chores as life altering experiences. At some point I’m sure I’ll do a world tour asking audiences to
I was an admirer or Steve Jobs. The amount of creativity that he inspired made a huge difference to modern-day technology. To me, he was the ultimate example of a charismatic leader. However, I fear he was better at telling time than that he was at clock building. And as
When I moved into a leadership role at my first start-up, I was recommended to read “Leadership is an Art” by Max Depree. One of the fist sentences in this book always stuck with me: The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. Huh? What do you mean
An exercise: Stand in front of a group, and say something meaningful on a topic the audience cares about. No, no, that’s not all, here comes the hard part: Now, look around the room (realistically: zoom room). Hopefully you see familiar faces. Now do this exercise in empathic listening:
Platform
And... we’re back to our exciting series on how to structure engineering organizations! Our ultimate goal? To finally answer your kid’s FAQ: “Mommy, daddy, where do platform teams come from?” In episodes I and II we covered two fundamentalist approaches of how we could structure an engineering organization:
Platform
I have to apologize to you all. I had not anticipated the amount of sleepless nights and marital problems I would cause to many of you by leaving you hanging with a cliffhanger like that, last week. A few cleaned up responses: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE GO VERTICAL!? I NEED
Platform
“But we have a QA team, right. Why aren’t they writing the end-to-end tests for this?” “We have a mobile team, right? Why don’t they build the mobile version of this?” “We have a performance team, right. Why don’t they write the load tests for this?” Excellent
Essentials
The bad guys are winning. People have lost all hope. Who could possibly still save the day? Some noise comes from the bushes. All of a sudden, an excessively muscular dude with a head band jumps out from the branches. He’s carrying a large machine gun, wearing belts of
Tech
To me, the most exciting software is the type that sparks creative use cases. Software that ends up being used in ways that its developers never anticipated. This tends to happen primarily with software that has managed to transform itself into a platform. Rather than pretending to be able to