The past year I’ve been working on a book. I organized my entire life to carve out and preserve my Saturdays for this project. It is finally done (almost! Just reviews of proof pages to go); I got my weekends back just in time to work them through the review cycle, and with the worst […]
I have been quiet on here lately because I’ve been focused on writing a book. The book proper will come out in early 2024, but section 1 – what it means to be the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) of your career – is now available for early release. You can see it on the O’Reilly […]
We talked about hiring directors, the fallacy of “servant leadership”, and what makes teams great [listen].
I recorded an episode of the DOU podcast with Oleks. It was an interesting and fun conversation!
When I talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), I’m typically coming at it from an angle of systematic change. The purpose of DEI, as I see it, is to dismantle a rigged system and move to something more equitable. This is why the concept of “no politics at work” is seen as antithetical to […]
I bought Thinking in Bets (Amazon) a while ago, April 2020 to be precise. It finally made it’s way out of my endless “to read” pile because I was having something of a crisis of confidence about my own decision making. Some key thing that stood out. Separating analysis of the result from the decision […]
I recorded an episode of Console‘s DevTools podcast, talking about privacy engineering. You can listen to it here.
I’m unsure what I think about Machiavelli for Women (Amazon). There were things that I appreciated, and things that were infuriating. To be fair, the things I found infuriating were mostly also things the author herself notes as infuriating, saying her goal with the book is to articulate what works as things are, not what […]
One of my coaching clients and I developed this framework to help him think about the kind of impact he wanted to have as a Staff+ engineer, and since then I’ve taken it to other clients and direct reports in a way to think about engineering growth outside of any particular job ladder. The four […]
The wonderful Tanya put together this spreadsheet that helps you track where you are on the 5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job. I love this idea, because it pushes us out of the moment into the long term, which makes it easier to be rational. There’s the risk in the short term decision, […]