Shaun Abram
Technology and Leadership Blog
Subscribe to RSS FeedBlog post summary: Prioritizing with Cost of Delay
Prioritizing with Cost of Delay is an article by Jeff Palmer (web, twitter, linkedin).
This article had me engrossed with the opening paragraph. It is a short article (6 minute) read, so I suggest reading it directly, but find a summary below, mainly for my own benefit.
Tags: costofdelay, summary
Git Branching Strategies
Some quick notes on different Git Branching strategies.
I am covering the 3 main strategies, and discussing them in increasing order of complexity: GitHub Flow, GitLab Flow and Git Flow.
Tags: branching, git, gitflow, github, githubflow, gitlabflow
How to create a password protected zip file
Because I forget every single time…
$ zip -rP yourpassword newzipname.zip foldername
Book chapter summary: Managing Incidents
This is a slight abridged version of Chapter 14, “Managing Incidents, by Andrew Stribblehill from the excellent “SRE Book“. (Original is 2200 words, this is 1200)
Tags: sitereliabilityengineering, sre, summary, thesrebook
An introduction to OKRs
Some quick notes on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Much of this is taken from these (better!) sources, so I’d recommend checking these out first:
- What is an OKR? Here are the basics
- John Doerr on OKRs (youtube.com)
- The OKR Origin Story
- Engineering OKR examples
Tags: objectives, okr
Book Summary: Accelerate
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations is a book by by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. It is a follow on from the State of DevOps Reports that Forsgren and Humble used to publish (and which I wrote about before in Development and delivery practices for team success). I highly recommend buying the book, but here are some chapter summaries for the highlights.
Tags: accelerate, books, cicd, devops, metrics, mttr, stateofdevops, summary
Article summary: The future of work is written
“The future of work is written” is an article from Juan Pablo Buriticá from Stripe published on increment.com.
This is a summary of the keys points from the article, but the original is definitely worth reading, and not long itself (the original is 2300 words; this is 250).
Tags: communication, documentation, summary
What is an Engineering Manager?
The role of an Engineering Manager (aka Development Manager) will vary from company to company, but this post covers what, in my humble opinion, the core expectations, duties and deliverables of an EM are.
It is intended primarily as a guide to engineers who are starting down the path of Engineering Management.
At its essence, the role of an EM is about:
Building, leading and retaining high performance teams that regularly ship software to meet business requirements.
Let’s break that down into 5 key areas…
Tags: engineeringmanager, leadership, management, newmanager
How to give difficult feedback
Giving difficult feedback is a critical part of being a manager, and often the part that comes hardest to many. This post covers some strategies for handling that, and dealing with underperformance.
The vast majority of this material (or the good parts, at least) came directly from a great talk by Claire Lew at Know Your Team, and you can find a related post from her in this 4 tips to give tough feedback post. I recently signed up to the Know Your Team annual plan and it has been well worth it.
Tags: knowyourteam, management
Blog post summary: What is an Engineering Manager?
I liked the short What is an Engineering Manager? post on the AWS blog (from David Ives @ Pusher). This is a summary, but the original is worth reading and not much longer…
Tags: developmentmanager, devmanager, leadership, management, summary
Engineering Growth Framework from Medium
I recently started a new role, and one of the first things I’ve been looking at is career ladders (aka job rubrics), org structure, and performance reviews (a.k.a. talent reviews or growth frameworks).
In that vein, the Medium Engineering team’s “Growth Framework” was recommended to me, so this is a quick summary of it.
TLDR; Medium have a “Growth Framework” for recognizing and developing their team that uses 4 categories (Building, Executing, Supporting, Strengthening) each with 4 tracks. Each track has 5 increasingly difficult to achieve milestones, and each level of milestone has points associated with it. The more points you have, the higher your level, which translates into job titles. Whew! It is a complex system, and while perhaps more complex than many (especially smaller) organizations need, it is none a very interesting framework which many might use as a reference. The tracks, milestones and examples in particular can be useful inspiration when putting together your own career guides.
Tags: management, medium, people, rubrics
Blog post summary: Automating safe, hands-off deployments at AWS
AWS’s Clare Liguori wrote an excellent blog post on Automating safe, hands-off deployments.
This is a summary (1,700 words, vs 5,300 in the original) and mostly just a copy & paste of highlights. I have also skipped some of the sections that are at scales larger than most folks deal with (e.g. global releases across 26 regions!).
Tags: aws, cicd, continuousdelivery, continuousdeployment, summary
Preparing for 1-1s as a manager
1-1s are likely to be some of the most important meetings on your calendar. This post discusses how to prepare and run these in a way that makes them useful for both you and your team member, and helps keep both of you accountable.
Tags: 1-1s, leadership, management, yourteam
Beginning with SRE
This post is an introduction into some basic SRE practices we have been implementing at my company recently.
I’ve written before on SRE, including on SRE resources, SLIs, SLOs and SLAs, and Creating an SRE team, but this is a more practical guide to getting started.
Tags: servicelevelagreements, sitereliabilityengineering, sla, sli, slo, sre, thesrebook
SRE Metrics
A very quick post on some of the most commonly used SRE metrics: The Four Golden Metrics, and RED & USE.
Tags: 4goldenmetrics, metrics, sitereliabilityengineering, sre