I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software, and particularly enjoyed this quote from a memo discussed in the Zero Defects chapter: You can improve the quality of your code, and if you do, the rewards for yourself and for Microsoft will be immense. The hardest part is to decide that you want to write perfect code. If I wrote that in an internal memo, I imagine the engineering team would mutiny, but software quality is certainly an interesting topic where I continue to refine my ...| lethain.com
non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust| benkuhn.net
A bit over a week from now, I’ll be joining a company to start a new role, and I wanted to ramble a bit to braindump the numerous loose threads in my head as I transitioned from Calm to the past month of full-time writing, and then into this new role. This isn’t really a job announcement post per se, as I won’t share any details about the job itself until I’ve officially started. Instead, this is a snapshot of what’s top of mind for me, particularly driven by the dozens of discussio...| lethain.com
For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I actually include in the report? Any discussion about measuring engineering organizations quickly unearths strong opinions. Anything but sprint points! Just use SPACE! Track...| lethain.com
Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team. Later on, things are easy as well. You have seventy engineers spread across eight to ten mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive teams with names like Storage, Traffic, and Compute. You’ll pull up the organizati...| Infrastructure Engineering