Folks are sometimes surprised to learn that I started out working as a frontend engineer. I’d like to imagine it’s because I’m so terribly knowledgeable about infrastructure, but I suspect it’s mostly grounded in my unconscionably poor design aesthetic. Something that has stuck with me from that experience was feeling treated as a second-tier engineer: folks were unwilling to do any frontend work, but were careful to categorize it as trivial.| lethain.com
How thoughtful systems (and lots of emoji) make for happy, efficient teams—whether your desks are distributed across floors, cities, or continents.| increment.com
Big Ball of Mud was published twenty years ago, and rings just as true today: the most prominent architecture in successful, growth-stage companies is non-architecture. Crisp patterns are slowly overgrown by the chaotic tendrils of quick fixes, and productivity creeps towards zero.| lethain.com
As an organization grows beyond fifty people or so, you’ll feel a building pressure to add a third layer of management, and eventually you will. This ought to be a benign event, what’s the difference between supporting some managers and supporting their managers? It shouldn’t be too different, but for me it was when my previous mechanisms of alignment stopped working very well. Two of the most effective tools I’ve found are strategy and vision documents, and this post introduces how t...| lethain.com
About a year ago I started sending public weekly updates to a relevant public (within the company) mailing list. I’ve found the practice useful enough to write a few works on the how and why. This practice is sometimes called a 5-15 report reflecting the goal of spending fifteen minutes a week writing a report that can be read in five minutes.| lethain.com
In small organizations, it’s easy for folks to be aware of what others are doing and to recollect how you’ve previously approached similar problems. This hive mind and memory creates a consistency to decision making that correlates strongly with quality. The subtle slide into inconsistency is often one of the most challenging aspects of evolving from a small team into a much larger one.| lethain.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com