I got harsh feedback as a manager. One was, “You don’t seem to be able to articulate your philosophy on management and leadership.” Ouch! My immediate reaction was defensive. “No wait – I’ve been writing about management this whole time.” After going through denial, I understood how dead-on correct the senior manager was – What […]
Bus factor trends to zero
“We should get our bus factor higher. It’s like 1.” How many times have you heard this? I’ve been in too many meetings ending with a quip about bus factors. If you haven’t heard, bus factor is the number of engineers you can lose before a project stalls. The bus factor on every project starts at […]
Requirements lawyering with specs
Back in 6th grade, I was introduced to a card game Magic the Gathering. I drifted in and out of the game by high school. When a few of my friends picked up the game out of nostalgia in college, I played a few matches and I got decent enough to tag along with them […]
Management and life lessons from an Uber driver
“How old do you think I am?” I glanced at the Uber driver’s face. Every time I’m asked this question… I don’t know how to respond. I would feel bad guessing too high and they’re definitely not 21. I’ve learned looking at the face isn’t a good way to guess age because I don’t know if […]
Document every glitch
One morning my CTO called me at 6 in the morning, “The site is down! Fix it!” I examined the system. I poked around, and the system recovered. No big deal. I reported everything was okay. And then the hiccups began occurring frequently, correlated with the increase of customers and processing of data. The outages […]
How many developer weeks (dukes) will that take?
My friend received his first opportunity to plan the roadmap. He’s surprised because in his previous role, he was handed features to code by a product manager. Now he gets to determine what he’ll be building and when he’ll deliver them. He feels a new sense of control he’s never had before. He decided to […]
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