Reading List for February 8th

Some of the things that have been shared with me or caught my attention in the last week or so. A nice balance of engineering and non-engineering this week.

Engineering

I cannae change the laws of physics!

Leadership

• The people you’re leading have changed None of us are the same people we were before all this madness started over two years ago. It’s time to get to know everyone anew again.
• Red Light, Green Light or Where You Sit Determines What You See Never forget that you probably don’t have the whole picture.

Software Engineering at Scale

• Moving Calm to Microservices Breaking up the monolith that used to serve the company but is now holding them back. I’ve been reading a lot about various companies’ microservices refactors as they move from slap-it-all-together-to-get-series-A to something that can scale with product-market fit.
• 12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory (2016) Technical debt and architecture and system level thinking are neglected to build yet-another shiny thing the actual customers might not have actually asked for.
• Hapi V17 Upgrade Guide - Your Move to Async Await the shipping label service I helped launch is built on Hapi and I remember our early discussions about async-await. Bookmarking this for future reference… and this one too - updating to v20

Staff Engineering Career Advice

• Backend Engineering I liked how GitLab breaks down the responsibilities of backend engineers and how they distinguish the additional expectations of Staff engineers.
• Career Advancement as a Software Developer in a Flat Organization What’s the next step when there is no next step?
• Why Targeting a Job Title as a Goal Doesn’t Work Don’t just think about the title, but what it is about that title (the responsibilties) that you find attractive. Dovetails nicely with the other links here.
• Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never Ignore a Recruiter I’m getting a lot of recruiter pings lately. Many of them are annoying but there are lessons to be learned.
• Don’t let HR determine your career ambition HR and the C-suite have set up carrots and hoops. Don’t let them be the only people in the driver’s seat.
• One Year of Experience, Ten Times If you want to level up, you can’t just keep doing the same time over and over again.
• Where do Staff-plus engineers fit into the org? It helps to know what archetype(s) of staff engineer you align with, and how that fits into your organization.

Not Engineering

Here there be monsters

Music, Professor!

• Massive Ego - The New Normal - Limited Mailorder Edition Awesome darkwave release that I’ve been waiting and waiting for. The EP releases this Friday.
• Ke$ha - C’Mon A friend forwarded this video to me - said it reminded them of me. Lots of furries.

Fashion

• Nucleus - Super Eyelet Long Skirt OMG. I love this skirt. Added to my wishlist.

Furry Fight!

• Furries are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor So proud to be part of the furry fandom and to support this library.
• How to Approach Me with Scamcoin Jobs Xe, a favorite furry engineer, weighs in on the waste of talent that is NFTs.
• Animaze Make your own avatar that moves as you do (see picture above). Just starting to play with this. Haven’t hooked it up to Zoom yet.

Star Trekkin’

• A Queerer Version of the Final Frontier Blu Del Barrio and Ian Alexander are two of the best things about Star Trek right now. Love Ian’s eye makeup for the photoshoot especially.

See you next week with more!