Issue #180, 6th May 2016

This Week's Favorite


Some Thoughts on Mentoring
4 minutes read.

Mentoring is one of the best ways to speed up your learning and better understand your weak or blind spots. Use this post to think about who's helping you to scale yourself, and how you can be that person for others.

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Culture


Fixed the Bug, Boss!
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Share with developers, smile and say "I'm sure this is not how you solve bugs, right?"

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Advice Is Cheap — Context Is Priceless
11 minutes read.

Hiten Shah shares how you can improve the way you provide a critical advice when someone needs a serious wake-up call. Hiten's tip on "Use shared context to resonate, not just relate" made me think about the way I usually offer context and how much I still need to learn in order to convey a strong and clear message.

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DevOps for Developers: Building an Effective Ops Org (Video)
45 minutes read.

It's amazing how our industry shifts to blend different roles together, where many parts of traditional QA and Ops are now part of the practices and processes of software engineers. This requires a lot of empathy and willingness to learn how systems work, rather than how code works. I love how Charity phrased it: "you need to get buy-in from the people you want to help you with your services."

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Are You Being Too Agile?
4 minutes read.

Agile can be easily misused -- "The benefit of feedback is not a dichotomy; it’s on a scale, so the more you know about the end goal, the less benefit you get from being iterative, because any feedback collected doesn’t provide new information." -- I see the same thing happening when working on a feature, preferring to iterate on the architecture of a well-known result is a sign for laziness, not agility.

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Peopleware


Overcoming the Tyranny of “Should”
4 minutes read.

"Am I leveraging every moment of time the way I should?" -- Danielle Morrill with a sincere moment of freeing yourself from chasing endless shoulds.

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What Do I Do With My Time as a New Manager?
3 minutes read.

I think that Camille Fournier's advice is important for new and experienced managers, as often the following implicit expectation is not clear enough: "part of your job now is to define what work needs to be done. Your boss won't always be able to tell you what to do, and she probably expects you to tell her what needs to be done. Use this time to answer that question."

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How to Start Speaking (In Tech Conferences)
4 minutes read.

Karen Meep with wonderful insights on how to get out of the building and share your insights with others. This is golden: "Do your thing, even if your thing is weird. The thing about tech conferences is that they’re full of tech people. We’re weird people. We like weird things."

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Inspiring Tweets


@tenderlove: This week on Game of Thrones: Jon Snow admits to being the founder of Bitcoin

@rkoutnik: Don't think 'culture fit', think 'culture add'. You want your company's culture to grow, not stagnate.

- 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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