Issue #241, 7th July 2017

This Week's Favorite


Speed in Software Development
15 minutes read.

A long read, but an incredibly well-thought article by Michael Dubakov. Take a good cup of coffee and go for it. One of my better morning reads.

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Culture


When the Developers Have to Write User Stories #Agile
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Interviewing: Hiring Mistakes & Tips
4 minutes read.

When I talk with other hiring managers I often feel we make the mistake of treating interviews as if we were born to do it. No solid preparation. Every question you ask should provide value, an insight and clearer understanding into how working together would be like. I saw people wasting hours talking with people they knew after 15 minutes were not a good fit. This is a "hiring smell" you should always be thinking of. One example of that as Baron Schwartz shares: "The first big no-no in interviewing is to fear losing a candidate. You need to understand that the vast majority of people you’ll talk to are not the right fit."

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How Slack Supports Junior Engineers
12 minutes read.

This is the feelings and experience you'd like junior engineers to have interviewing and onboarding in your company. Slack's "An opt-in professional development fund " is a great way to promote learning and growth. The statement that I took from this post was "weekly meetings and concrete goals enabled my mentor, manager and me to work together to improve my skills and velocity in a positive, constructive, measurable way." -- to practice growth, you have to put the effort, make the time, and held accountable for your goals. It's your career.

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How to Write Documentation for People That Don't Read (Video)
29 minutes read.

Learning how to write documentation is a critical skill when it comes to contributing to documenting internal systems, contributing to open-source or simply working on Enterprise products for other engineers. One of the best videos for software engineers, by an engineer.

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Peopleware


Optimizing Life for "Interesting"
4 minutes read.

Great thread to optimize for learning: "How do you get good at compressing (of information)? You optimize for interesting." -- maybe it's time to stop forcing ourselves to complete some books and focus on reading things that we cannot put aside.

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Management Philosophy
4 minutes read.

A lot of good tips you can follow on. I loved this advice "Generally, folks writing software for a living are doing it because they have some proclivity for designing and building things. Like all works that take shape in the mind, it’s a fundamentally creative endeavor. Removing the creativity from someone’s creative endeavor is not only a (terrible) accomplishment, but one that removes any reason they have to continue working on said endeavor." -- let people practice, don't try to "save" them. Be their supporter.

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“This Sums Up Pretty Much a Lot of Our Projects.” -- I Love This Slide.
1 minutes read.

I'd say the same about many features I've developed. Learning to fall in love with the problem is key here. I'd probably print this quote and add an airplane emoji to it. Share it with your teammates.

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Inspiring Tweets


@rands: My definition of a healthy team: high flow and low drama.

@_jfeldman: The most important three words that a leader can say to ensure staff engagement: "I was wrong."

- 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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