Kim Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. This is a fantastic book. I resisted reading it for a long time because I associated “radical candor” with Silicon Valley bros patting themselves on the back for being a jerk. It’s not that, at all. This has reframed my approach to communication in the workplace. Recommended. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. A straightforward narrative read, and a gentle introduction to the idea o...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
— Statistics, lies and the virus: five lessons from a pandemic. — Practical Management Expectations (and Mandates). The VPE of Spotify’s expectations for managers. — Being the grumpy engineer is harmful to your career. Avoid falling into the feasibility trap. — Camille Fournier on Effectively Managing Internal Platform Teams. “Great platform teams can tell a story about what they have built, what they are building, and why these products make the overall engineering team more effe...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
— To lead, you have to follow. “I think this is the most important lesson I’ve learned over the past few years: the most effective leaders spend more time following than they do leading. This idea also comes up in the idea of the “first follower creates a leader”, but effective leaders don’t split the world into a leader and follower dichotomy, rather they move in and out of leadership and follower roles with the folks around them.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Holding a successful virtual meeting can be challenging, especially when the goal is to collaborate or brainstorm. It’s hard! The good news is that if you approach it intentionally and do the work, you can do it successfully. The dirty secret is that many in-person meetings don’t work particularly well, either. People don’t like meetings for a reason. Discussions are undirected, topics are missed, decisions aren’t captured, time is wasted. When meeting in person, it’s easy to coast ...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
— Action Produces Information and Decisiveness is Just as Important as Deliberation. “In theory, the most difficult challenge in decision making is making the right decision. In practice, I’ve found that the most difficult challenge in decision making is executing a decision you do not want to do.” — Why Is This Idiot Running My Engineering Org? “When people begin to take on leadership roles eventually they have to decide how they are going to handle fear.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
One idea I’ve found surprisingly useful is summed up in a single sentence: While it is important to make the right decision, it is more important to do the work to make the decision right. This idea puts the focus on implementation as the fulcrum of a successful decision. It shows why quickly making and acting upon a good-enough decision can be better than spending a long time analyzing and searching for the perfect decision.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Charles Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Mann is the author of two other great history books, 1491 and 1493. One of the things that struck me was the sheer amount of grueling, monotonous, detail-intensive hard work that Norman Borlaug did to cultivate his new dwarf wheat variety that has kept literally hundreds of millions of people from starving.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
“No” is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it. We’ve been conditioned to fear the word “No.” But it is a statement of perception far more often than of fact. It seldom means, “I have considered all the facts and made a rational choice.” Instead, “No” is often a decision, frequently temporary, to maintain the status quo. Change is scary, and “No” provides a little protection from that scariness.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
— Writing to Understand. “… writing it down often forces us to have differently shaped or more complex thoughts than we would in our head. In particular written or spoken thoughts tend to be more coherent than those in your head… [This] forces you to have thoughts you were skipping over when you tried to have them in your head, and spelling out those detail can help you make sense of them.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Video conference meetings are hard to love. At a first approximation, everyone hated meetings even back when we could sit together around a long table in a small room. (Remember that?) Now meetings don’t even have the advantage of giving participants a single shared physical experience to loathe. It’s hard to be a meeting these days. And it goes further than that. One of the most challenging things about working remotely is that we lack the physical presence and face-to-face human contact...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
‘I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’. It’s oddly well put. A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters. A look at Orwell in the context of his time, and how and why he holds up so well. What struck me is what Hitchens calls Orwell’s “power of facing,” in other words, the ability to look directly at unpleasant facts. Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night. I didn’t much care for her previous work, All the Birds in the Sky.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Pinboard is Eleven. “Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me. Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
I owe a lot to Michael Lopp. Years ago, his book, Being Geek, and his blog, Rands in Repose, were my first introductions to thinking about software engineering and engineering management as a capital letter “C” Career. And they were my first introduction to the concept of regular 1:1s and other fundamental management concepts. What I learned from him allowed me to avoid creating a total disaster of everything when I was made a manager with no training.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
I use MailMate for my email, since it is very fast, customizable, and integrates with many other programs, and supports Markdown natively. It isn’t pretty, its documentation has gaps, and it isn’t for everyone—but it’s power cannot be matched. I’m a big believer in minimizing the amount of time it takes to do common tasks. I can work faster and more easily keep my mental context. Here are a few Alfred integrations I’ve created to make my work faster and keep my hands on the keyboard.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Seven years back, when Florence was besieged by the Emperor and begging for French aid, the burgesses went to the merchant Borgherini’s house: ‘We want to buy your bedroom.’ There were fine painted panels, rich hangings and other furnishings they thought might make a bribe for King François. But Margherita, the merchant’s wife, stood her ground and threw their offer back in their faces. Not everything in life is for sale, she said.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
James Wood, Serious noticing. Some good stuff in here, but ultimately not engaging. Anton Howes, Arts and Minds. I’ve really enjoyed Howes’s Substack and Twitter about the history of invention and innovation. But I put this one down—I just couldn’t make myself care that much about the inside baseball of the Royal Society of Arts. John Scalzi, The Last Emporox. The conclusion of The Interdependency series. A vintage Scalzi space midwestern.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Like many people lately, I spend half my day in Zoom meetings. One (slightly) annoying thing about clicking on a Zoom link from Slack or an email: To enter a meeting, you first get (1) bounced to a web browser, that (2) asks if it can open an external application, that (3) you then have to click to confirm. And then, (4) you have to close the browser tab. There are browser hacks you can do on Chrome to make the browser not ask about opening zoom, but a better solution on the Mac is to use Cho...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Recently I listened to the audiobook of The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim. In the past, I’ve recommended its predecessor, The Phoenix Project, to multiple people, albeit reluctantly and tinged with embarrassed explanations about the format—the “business novel.” The author, Gene Kim, presents his thesis as a fictional narrative constructed solely to serve that end. The Ur-book in this genre is The Goal, which lives on more than one list of the best business books.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
You are about to violate a key leadership rule: “You sign up for things and get them done. Every single time.” … Leaders set the bar for what is and is not acceptable on their teams. They define this bar both overtly with the words they say, and more subtly with their actions. There are two scenarios that may play out when you’ve reached Meeting Blur: either you don’t change anything and do all of your work poorly, or you drop some of that work, which equates to a missed commitment.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Another thing I learned along the way is how critical it is to have senior leadership support. And support in actions, not words. Senior leaders need to demonstrate their commitment to creating a learning organization. I will share the behaviors I try to model with my teams. I believe passionately in honoring and extracting reality. If I am a senior leader and my team doesn’t feel comfortable sharing risks, then I will never truly know reality.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel. I haven’t read many novels yet this year, but this is my favorite. Subtle and engaging. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. I’m finding this to be really good. It’s famously hard to measure software developer productivity, but they make the best arguments I’ve seen for their measures. Peter Ackroyd, Dominion: The History of England fro...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
I write a lot of Markdown, and I’ve long had a few simple TextExpander snippets that easily let me insert a markdown link to the front-most window in either Safari or Chrome. They are very simple, for example: tell application "Safari" set t to name of current tab of window 1 set U to URL of current tab of window 1 end tell "[" & t & "](" & U & ")" But… I’ve been recently using Ulysses for writing, which is a Markdown editor, mostly and sort of.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
I don’t like receiving feedback. But… As an engineering manager I give people feedback all the time. I preach the gospel of feedback every day. That doesn’t mean that I like it when feedback happens to me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have an emotional reaction. Or that I don’t feel called out or suddenly vulnerable. Or that I always handle it as gracefully as I’d like. What’s tough about feedback is that it targets what we are most invested in—ourselves—and for a brief mo...| Posts on Box Kite Machine
In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography. You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that ‘To draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Like many people lately, I spend half my day in Zoom meetings. And also like many people, I’m working from house noisy from kids running around. So my usual mode of operation on a call is to mute myself except when actually speaking. On the Mac, Zoom provides a built in global keyboard shortcut (Command-Shift-A) so I can toggle mute/unmute no matter what app I’m using. But that’s awkward to remember and type.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
My former writing teacher, the essayist and cartoonist Timothy Kreider, explained revision to me: “One of my favorite phrases is l’esprit d’escalier, ‘the spirit of the staircase’ — meaning that experience of realizing, too late, what the perfect thing to have said at the party, in a conversation or argument or flirtation would have been. Writing offers us one of the rare chances in life at a do-over: to get it right and say what we meant this time.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
I find myself more willing to buy/read physical books now that social distancing confines me to a small collection of rooms. The Mirror and the Light: Hilary Mantel. The final book in the series starting with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Her language is beautiful. Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070: Robin Fleming. Great by Choice: Jim Collins. This is one of those business books that you can get 90% of the value from by reading the chapter summaries.| Posts on Box Kite Machine
Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors: Peter Ackroyd and Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I: Peter Ackroyd. I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole with these. Children of Ruin: Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sequel to Children of Time. The first was great. This one I’m having trouble getting through and may stop. Managing The Professional Service Firm: David H.| Box Kite Machine
“How on earth could he say those things so confidently when he doesn’t have a clue about what’s happening down here? It’s kind of like the American politicians who used to visit Vietnam, look around a bit, talk to the top brass in the military command, review some statistics, and then proclaim that the war was being won and they could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Right! … Being present allows you, as a leader, to connect personally with your people, and personal connectio...| Box Kite Machine
Giving feedback is a core responsibility of any leader. But it can be surprisingly easy to convince yourself not to do it—especially if you are empathetic and caring. (Both great qualities!) Every leader has shied away from saying the necessary thing at times. It can be incredibly uncomfortable! Genuinely caring about your people and their success, and using that care to build a relationship on a foundation of mutual trust, is the hallmark of a great manager. Giving difficult feedback is no...| Box Kite Machine
We had an internal culture of counting the passage of time from Day 0, the day (in California) we started working on the project. We made the first calls and published our first vaccine availability on Day 1. I instituted this little meme mostly to keep up the perception of urgency among everyone. We repeated a mantra: Every day matters. Every dose matters. Where other orgs would say, ‘Yeah I think we can have a meeting about that this coming Monday,’ I would say, ‘It is Day 4. On what ...| Box Kite Machine
A lot of people think of Twitter as a public utility, a public trust, “the town square,” a company with an important social mission that many of its users and employees and Elon Musk care about deeply. And its CEO and board of directors essentially can’t bring themselves to talk about it. When employees asked him about what was best for the company, Agrawal could talk only about the shareholders. Elon Musk is not at all embarrassed to say that Twitter has an important public mission, wh...| Box Kite Machine
As an engineering leader, it’s important to remind your team that moving fast doesn’t mean working harder, or longer, or on the weekends. And it definitely doesn’t mean releasing a perfect product from day one. It requires cutting scope, iterating over time, and being more at ease with putting out a feature that’s not fully baked in order to learn what customers want. You’re not going to get everything right from the outset, and that’s okay. The goal is to learn as you go: formula...| Box Kite Machine
The Wright brothers building bicycles, 1897 was originally published in Box Kite Machine.| Box Kite Machine
The already classic scene in which Paul wrenches the chorus to Get Back out of himself shows us, not just a moment of inspiration, but how the group pick up on what is not an obviously promising fragment and begin the process of turning it into a song. In the days to follow, they keep going at it, day after day, run-through after run-through, chipping away, laboriously sculpting the song into something that seems, in its final form, perfectly effortless. As viewers, we get bored of seeing the...| Box Kite Machine
A recurring bug in many leaders’ operating systems—including mine—is overlooking just how much useful context a leader can have than folks on their team. A regular practice I’ve adopted is sending a brief, five-minute weekly video communication to my team. The weekly comms, in fact, has been a long tradition in my org predating me that I have continued. Having been on both the receiving and sending end of the regular weekly comms, I’ve come to believe that this is a critical leaders...| Box Kite Machine
Groups of technically oriented people often want to optimize the work process to those activities needed for the technically oriented output, and overlook those that are focused on the needs of humans and groups of humans working together. Yes, you can have a standup and not get any value from it. You can also not have a standup and avoid providing a convenient mechanism for taking advantage of the differences in observation, interpretation, and significance made by the entire team. If you’...| Box Kite Machine
… most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. Yes, I’m quoting Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders again. This quote is refer...| Box Kite Machine
Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma. I resisted reading this for a long time because it’s so much a part of the fabric of working in tech. I’m glad I did. Cost structures matter. Recommended. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. I listened to this as an audiobook, read by Coates himself. Short but powerful. Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. If you want to know why SpaceX can do so much in so little time, this is where to s...| Box Kite Machine
As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the p...| Box Kite Machine
Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. I really enjoyed this one. It draws a straight line of innovation in math and astronomy through the middle ages into the Renaissance. People in the past are always smarter than you think they were. If you ever wondered how people actually did arithmatic with Roman numerals, this is the book for you. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. This book has not aged well, despite and especially because of the pandemic. Peter Baker and Su...| Box Kite Machine
Things were simpler as an individual contributor. You understood what your teammates were up to, you chatted every day, and you knew they had your back—and you had theirs. Now you’re a people manager. On bad days, it feels like you’re stuck on an island, squinting across the water at your peers busily doing … something on their own little islands. Sooner or later, most people managers suffer a painful day that ends with self-searching questions like: “Why can’t I get my team what ...| Box Kite Machine
— The Metronome. “Two minutes early to a meeting. As much as possible. The last act of my morning opening productivity ramp. What lessons do I demonstrate to the meeting attendees by being there two minutes early? A couple: beginning on time is respectful to attendees, and meetings are expensive affairs, so let’s invest our time wisely. There’s a more fundamental lesson I am teaching: Leaders are capable of showing up to meetings on time.” — Receive Better Feedback by Asking and L...| Box Kite Machine
Ted Chiang, Exhalation. A collection of short stories from my favorite living fiction writer. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and the title story, Exhalation, are my favorites in this collection. Gene Wolfe, Epiphany of the Long Sun. I enjoyed books 1 and 2 of the series, but I put this one down. I read for pages at a stretch with no idea what was physically happening in the story. Rebecca Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Neanderthals are much more interesting th...| Box Kite Machine
Fucking Steve always gets it right. … Steve really always gets it right. I mean it, precisely, like an engineer. I am not joking, and I am not exaggerating. … I didn’t say Steve is always right. I said he always gets it right. Like anyone, he is wrong sometimes, but he insists, and not gently either, that people tell him when he’s wrong, so he always gets it right in the end. Andy Grove, as quoted in Radical Candor, by Kim Scott. This is an interesting distinction. Steve Jobs is somet...| Box Kite Machine
I’ve never been into audiobooks, but I’ve taken up listening to them while exercising. I like it and feel better about it than listening to yet another podcast about Apple products. Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. An accessible narrative introduction to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work around heuristics and decision-making. And they led fascinating lives! Their representativeness heuristic is another way of looking at why narrative stories...| Box Kite Machine
“It’ll be a disaster,” Marie says. Her eyes narrow, and she raps the table. “We don’t have the people and we’ve never used that stack in production.” Devon, who’s been silent for the entire team meeting, nods, just barely. Angela’s heart rate spikes. Yesterday the company’s biggest customer asked—demanded really—a new feature nowhere on the roadmap with hairy technical implications. Angela, the team’s tech lead, immediately sprung into action, whiteboarded with other...| Box Kite Machine
Peter Thiel is a controversial figure for a good reason. But he’s also brilliant, accomplished, and takes (for better and worse) unpopular public stances. His track record of success makes him worth listening to. Zero To One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a collection of his thoughts about Silicon Valley startups. It is very much attuned to that particular environment, but I recommend it if you work in software anywhere.| Box Kite Machine