The tech industry is about leadership and adaptation, why should tech leadership be any different

Following up on my last article about the tech industry’s brewing culture war about the future of work, I decided to elaborate on 5 interesting lessons learned leading a team during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What I learned was that culture is key. It is the one constant your org can align to in times of change and uncertainty, and having a good culture made all this 100% less painful.

Culture is NOT ping pong tables and a keg — those things went…

What is this? High School?

The Nostalgic Before Times

Remember 2019? Back before everyone had to don their face coverings to get a loaf of bread at the store. Back when we flew to conferences on the company dime and got tipsy in hotel bars.

Remember Open Offices 🎧 😓

Remember sitting begrudgingly in open plan offices where we could listen to that awesome Old Town Road remix. Not the one with Billy Ray, but the one with Keith from sales on a call trying to convince some guy to upgrade their subscription to your app and it gets through your $300 headphones.

Remember “Collaboration” 🙄

That collaboration the execs pine about…

In 2021 there has been a noticeable trend in companies investing more in developer experience programs (DX). As the market becomes more technologically literate, we see a rising demand for companies to have tools available to technologists that enable customers to get more done without having to submit feature requests and wait for a whole sprint cycle or two before they can see a problem solved.

If you’re not on board with the DX revolution yet, here are 5 reasons you need a DX program so you don’t miss out on the next wave of how business will be done…

A simple thought process for thinking about tickets and priorities.

Whether you’re a PM or a developer you’re unable to escape the reality that is competing priorities. You’ll be working on a P0 (highest priority) urgent feature one day and the next, there will be a fire that customer support needs you to put out right now. Every ticket is P0 to the person that created it, but what nobody admits publicly is that baring production outages or security breaches, nothing is as urgent as it seems. how do you rationalize what you’ll work on this sprint?

These 4 pillars…

An actual interview I had at a FAANGMULA company. I didn't get the job 😂

Them: We think you're a great fit, we love your experience and profile. We’re looking for innovators, leaders, and game-changers like you, but we need you to do this exam to see if you can code.

Me: Exam? Just check out my Github. After all, you saw my profile right?

Them: Right, but we need to know if you understand those concepts.

Me: I'm happy to walk through any project on GH you found interesting.

Them: *😠 clinging to approved interview script* Given an binary…

"Kubernetes is not developer-friendly". I couldn't agree more here.

Having worked at a few startups ranging from 50-500 people I notice a push for full stack developers to own all of this. I remember an outburst of this developer who found out in addition to having to learn yet another JS framework they also had to learn docker, k8 and become an expert in AWS by the end of the week. So that begs the question, where is the line? …

Here’s What to do Instead

After getting my 100th passive-aggressive “quick follow up: please stop ignoring me” email from marketers trying to sell me a developer tool, I get the sense that nobody really knows how to market to developers. It’s either the same blanket approach marketers have been using for decades, or a bunch of lame memes on Reddit because, “developers are quirky right?”.

Developers are just people who like to get shit done. Given the nature of our work, we’ve become used to finding our own way or sourcing our answer from the community at large. …

Not your father’s spam filter

If you’re an engineer, you likely get a ton of emails about various things. Some of it’s recruiter spam, Github notifications, or very important emails from the boss announcing a re-org that doesn’t affect you. Some of these emails are things that require attention from you directly, others are more of an FYI notice, and the rest, make me question how good those spam filters actually are…

I subscribe to the goal of inbox zero. Every email in my box has been assessed and I made a decision to either address it, read and consider…