Issue #108, 19th December 2014

This Week's Favorite


Stuck Again
5 minutes read.

How do you create a rhythm of success? How do you form habits that can pull you away from the traditional analysis paralysis we often stuck in? Nathan Kontny, with a beautifully written post, explains how he runs his businesses.

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Culture


Management 101
1 minutes read.

As always, something to start the weekend with a huge smile on your face. Also, scroll down and look for Management 102 tweet. Good one as well.

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Helping Better Understand Events by Building a Post Mortem Tool
32 minutes read.

Building a strong culture doesn't happen by chance. It's not only matter of hiring "A+ players" and "getting out of their way". We need to be mindful. Without allowing our team to invest time in those habits that do not always have a direct impact on the business, we cannot really scale the company. You can use Etsy's tool for postmortems (it's open-source), but I suggest learning how they conduct and leverage these postmortems (check minute 08:01) to cultivate a learning organization.

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Code of Ages
14 minutes read.

What makes companies such as Google, Apple and others invent new programming languages? Interesting observations on the history of some of these languages and what we can learn from that. "For developers, then, choosing a language is like choosing citizenship in a country. You’re not only buying into syntax and semantics. You’re buying into economics and culture, the rules that shape how you earn your livelihood and the forces that channel your hopes and dreams."

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Transparent Salaries – It's Not for Breaking Workspace Taboos
5 minutes read.

Anna Loew of Giant Swarm shares why the decided to take some of the concepts Buffer implemented and open up their salaries to the team, using a well-defined formula and keeping an honest discussion on how to approach it. I believe that by making the process more transparent, and well articulated, it's easier to deal with the question Anna raises at the end of the post. From my experience, people appreciate this kind of experimentation and willingness to make a just culture, even if we not always agree with the decision or implementation details. This can be used to help them attract better talent in the long run.

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Peopleware


From Operator to Guide: Lessons Learned Moving From Engineering Into Management
8 minutes read.

Mathias Meyer shares his story on moving from an infrastructure engineer into a manager position, as a leader and CEO of a startup named Travis CI. Great read on how to let go and delegate responsibilities, being a mentor, setting clear and explicit expectations and plenty of other goodies.

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Excellence Through Code Reviewing
5 minutes read.

Read this post if you care about, or need to inspire your teammates on WHY Code Reviews are such a powerful tool to building a better engineering culture. Also, check the link to Fabien Sanglard’s site at the end. Wonderful posts on how you can use async code-reviews to learn from others' work.

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The Worst Programming Language Ever
59 minutes read.

This is a great talk, but probably will be best fit if you're a software engineer. Funny, painfully true and interesting. Share with your teammates, and try to come up with a few more features you could steal from other languages to make this programming language even worse.

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Inspiring Tweets


@Loh: "Money used to go to terabytes – servers, bandwidth, etc. Now it all goes to talent." -- @hunterwalk

@mrtazz: really wish noisy neighbor problems were restricted to the cloud

- Oren

P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.

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