Issue #178, 22nd April 2016

This Week's Favorite


Pieter Hintjens: A Protocol for Dying
7 minutes read.

Pieter Hintjens, the guy behind ZeroMQ, is dying. This post by Pieter is really hard to read but it will touch you deeply. A good wake up call to make sure we make the most out of our time, and to be kind to each other.

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Culture


"Code Mode", or Why Programmers Must Manage Programmers
1 minutes read.

Understanding this at a deep level is why programmers must manage programmers.

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Engineering Career Ladders as Cultural Manifesto
5 minutes read.

Setting explicit expectations at the right time is everything, including setting a clear path for your engineers to grow, may it be in their technical path or managerial one: "If you build ladders too early, you may have to rip apart much of what you built when the company experiences a phase of rapid growth... There’s also a risk of introducing ladders too late. In this instance, managers may find that behaviors they hope to prevent have already delivered a serious blow to the team’s culture, which can be difficult to correct."

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Management, Decision Making and Cutting the Baby in Half
2 minutes read.

Introducing the notion of reversibility as a way to guide your decisions is an incredibly powerful tool, as you can keep pushing forward by making quick decisions without exposing your team and company to huge risks. Highly recommend read by Philip Reynolds.

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Monkeys in Lab Coats: Applying Failure Testing Research @Netflix (Video)
44 minutes read.

Great talk by Kolton Andrus and Peter Alvaro on how to do real-life failure analysis at massive scale, putting an emphasis on the way end users experience those failures. From my experience, the way you approach testing is absolutely a byproduct of your culture.

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Peopleware


Newton’s 3 Laws of Software Craftsmanship
3 minutes read.

Wonderful observations on Software Craftsmanship by Christian Maioli Mackeprang. Two of my favorites: "Have you seen yourself hitting reload or re-running your program when you saw a bug, in the hopes that it went away, secretly knowing that the problem was still there? Don’t do that!" and "Languages that make it easy to write libraries will make it time-consuming to choose the right one. This can lead to analysis paralysis."

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Codeware - How to Present Code (slides)
5 minutes read.

Uri Nativ with a great presentation on how to present code to a large audience. Already shared with my team, and something I'm going to come back to for sure.

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You Are Not Your LDAP
3 minutes read.

"You are not your org chart, your department budget, or your title. Don’t let success at a company prevent you from pursuing scary and wonderful new opportunities to build" -- I've shared this post by Hunter Walk (ex-Google and YouTube) with a friend who struggled to figure out his next step, leaving a great company to chase his dreams.

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Inspiring Tweets


@JeremyGrosser: Tetris is a game about technical debt

@danbjson: The way to navigate in fog is not to stand still and find better binoculars. It is to move and look around again. The same w complex systems

- 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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