Satisfaction
- Manage your priorities and energy. | Irrational Exuberance • Discusses the right and wrong ways to balance your interests with your company’s goals so you stay motivated and energized in your role
Goals
- Some possible career goals • Julia Evans 📖
- IC vs EM track:
- Supper Club × Sarah Drasner on Engineering Management • Syntax 🎙️
- Engineering Leadership with Meri Williams • Console Dev Tools 🎙️
- Resilient Management with Lara Hogan • ShopTalk 🎙️
Leveraging 1:1s
- 1:1 topic ideas • Julia Evans 📖
- Conducting Effective and Regular One-on-Ones • Leah Candelaria-Tyler 📖
- 101 Questions to Ask in One on Ones Building Customer Driven SaaS Products • Jason Evanish 📖
- Things your manager might not know • Julia Evans 📖
Senior Engineering
- What’s a senior engineer’s job? • Julia Evans 📖
Staff Engineering
- The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change • Tanya Reilly 📕
- How to Set the Technical Direction for Your Team • James Hood 📖
- Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management • Scott Berkun 📕
- Getting to Commitment: Tackling broad technical problems in large organizations • Mattie Toia 📺
- A survey of engineering strategies • Will Larson 📖
- Progress is a lake, not a line • Kevin Sookocheff 📖
Tech leading
- “Ask if you have questions” isn’t enough • Julia Evans 📖
- How to answer questions in a helpful way • Julia Evans 📖
- How do you make an awesome team? • Julia Evans 📖
Feature leading
Goals
- Identify + reduce any ambiguity in the project requirements
- Make tasks available to teammates that align with what they want to learn and build
Tasks
- Meet with stakeholders + ask clarifying questions
- Gather supporting materials
- Mocks?
- Code?
- Build quick, throwaway POC prototypes to test hypotheses
Links
- Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) • GitLab Handbook 📖
Documenting Team Knowledge
Why is it so hard to document team knowledge?
- Documentation is hard because there are barriers to just blurting out the knowledge in the first place
- Where should it go?
- Does it appply to everyone? Who does it apply to?
- Am I allowed to update the doc I think it belongs in?
- Do I need to get permission? Discuss as a group?
- All of these things lead to NEVER WRITING THE IDEA down when these thoughts and steps come first
- Solution?
- Personal scratchpads for team members
- Just write the idea down immediately
- Consider the rest later, or don’t
- This relates to the Zettelkasten idea of focusing on just writing short notes in the flow of learning rather than starting with a daunting writing project concept and trying to force your way through it in linear order
- The latter requires too much willpower and is likely the wrong plan anyway
- The muscle memory is to just write down all interesting ideas in a precise and brief note, THEN connect them to related ideas, then move on
Onboarding docs
- All onboarding instructions should be written down
- Document it or you will forget it
- Train by creating docs, not by talking.
- Verbal instructions are easily forgotten and can’t be reviewed and inevitably lead to repeated questions
- “When someone new joins the team, I try to avoid verbal training. I believe processes should be documented. So I link to the relevant doc. If one doesn’t exist, we create it together. Outdated? We fix it. This fosters solid docs, exposes holes, and avoids ‘tribal knowledge’…” • Cory House 🐦
Freelancing
- Complete Guide To Freelance Web Development • Ryan Postell 📖