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The Lead Developer Conference 2019

Videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBzScQzZ83I-CMMW3_ULONRHVToeCBJqf

Scaling yourself as a first time engineer

  • Trust
  • Conflict is normal

Bug dives

  • Feedback: make sure customer success knows about bugs that are fixed and how
  • Bug dive:
    1. Context
    2. Investigation: log and code review, etc
    3. Diagnosis: how did you determine the cause? Demonstrate where things went wrong
    4. Fix: how was it fixed? Review fixed code
  • Strong components:
    • Narrative strong, but easy to follow. Invoice details about false stats: less about the fix, more about the process
    • Fix?
    • Conversational. Not a lecture. Handle questions, discuss the particulars.
  • Bug dives should be very specific, eg: how does messageFilter work and why were the results of anyEmail() not what we expected?

Guide your scaling engineering team

  • Shared understanding
  • Coherent architecture
  • Less coordination
  • Visibility
  • Autonomy

On motherhood and leading engineering teams

  • Start a transition plan as soon as possible
    • List everything you lead for a couple weeks
    • Prioritize and come up with a delegation plan
    • Share the plan a few months before leave
  • Supporting someone else
    • Gift: food delivery
    • Invite them to lunch before they come back, to reconnect. “No” is acceptable answer.
    • Check-in before return date, and see how they’re feeling about it. Extend leave time if needed.
  • Transition plan
    • Come back on a Friday. Ease into it.

Returning from a long parental leave

  • Came back after a six month break
  • Support returning reports
    • Re-onboard them
    • Remind them of their successes: probably feeling a bit anxious about performance
    • Set some short term goals
  • Supporting returning peers:
    • Don’t make assumptions about their time away and how they spent it
    • Don’t wait to say hi and catch up
  • Successful return
    • Clear scope of work
    • Clear on boarding plan
    • Support from boss, reports, peers

Growing pains

  • Architecture review

Your remote company can hire junior devs too

  • Have at least two seniors who are willing to work with the junior for a couple months and have time to do so
  • Make sure you have an onboarding plan that’s already been tested with someone more experienced
  • Progressive 1:1 schedule. Start with every day during the first week, then back off

Effective 1:1s for distributed teams

  • Tips
    • Keep a shared list of notes
    • Start with a checkin
  • Sections
    1. Check-in
      • Prompts to start conversation
      • Build empathy
      • Traffic light prompt: red exhausted, yellow tired, green energetic
    2. Discussion
      • Prompts
        • What’s holding you back right now?
      • Next: “where should we start today?” Don’t assume it’s on the agenda. Might be something they didn’t want to reveal/discuss ahead of time
      • Workshop ideas: ask for feedback in an idea, ask how a challenge might be approached
      • Create opportunity for them to take ownership over a problem/idea if they seem excited about it
    3. Follow ups. Always follow up. They might not bring something up that was discussed before, perhaps assuming you’re on it. Do what you say you’re going to do.
  • Relevant tweets with images/quotes

Splitting the monolith

  • Sit down with people and watch their full workflow
    • Don’t do surveys. You need to see the post it’s they consult, see how their workflow actually works

Managing an inclusive project solution

Managing risks together

  • Risks
    • Identify
      • Cynefin decision making framework
    • Communicate
    • Prioritize
      • PRN: (look up calculation later)
    • Mitigate
    • Roll up

Flying lessons

End of loops

Observability that matters

  • Logging, metrics, traces
  • Antipatterns
    • Obsession with tooling
    • Eventual observability: treating it as a feature to implement later, not a core requirement of the system

Components of high performing teams

  • Motivation
    • Mastery
    • Autonomy
    • Purpose
    • Safety
  • Reward hard feedback
  • Kaizen - small changes that lead to continual improvement.
  • Nemawashi - laying the ground work for change. Go to the biggest critic first.
  • You get what you measure. “What is the worst way someone could interpret (thing)?”
  • Interesting talk with examples from magazine publisher and Meetup

Say yes to the mess

  • Perfect is the enemy of good enough

The race to Mach 2.0 at scale

Was the Concord successful?

Conclusion

  • Most interesting thing: 4 out of 6 people will experience some disability during their lives
  • Thing to do differently: Start shared notes for 1:1