#161 – October 15, 2023
Don't.
How to keep us innovative?
7 minutes by Nicole
Don’t.
Use proven “boring” technology and only deviate when it solves a business problem fundamentally better.
Understand the problem
Prove that a solution exists
Reduce down the solution
Evaluate your design again
Socialize the design
As a principal engineer, you should keep your company off the bleeding edge as much as possible.
A frictionless way to build transactional notification infrastructure
sponsored by Knock
Building notifications gets complicated fast. Knock abstracts away the complexity of notification infrastructure by giving you a single API for managing channels such as email, in-app, Slack, push, and SMS. You also get full observability and analytics about your message and user behavior, letting engineering and product teams analyze, test, and iterate quickly.
How to Mix Junior and Senior Engineers on a Team
6 minutes by Jakub Svoboda
Experience isn’t always the most important. A team needs to be continuously adapting by bringing in fresh perspectives who eventually develop into leaders. Ideally, this means redressing the balance towards more junior members of your team, supplemented by more experienced eyes over things.
20 habits of high-performing leadership teams
2 minutes by Jurriaan Kamer
14 signs that your leadership team might not actually be a well-functioning team in contrast with 20 of the high-performing one.
How DoorDash Defines Great Engineering Management
13 minutes by Landis Coutzoukis and others
DoorDash shares their job description for engineering management track with detailed focus on business outcomes, team, and engineering excellence from manager to senior director.
On Ambiguity
2 minutes
One of the most common management mistakes is not providing clarity when people are wrong on important, invested efforts. Trying to be “nice” where you should be clear is one of the worst things you can do. Make sure there’s no ambiguity when someone is wrong on a big thing. Be empathetic, be polite, but be clear.