Posts 11–15 of 54

  • There's no manual for how to be a software engineering manager. But these will help.

    Monday, Sep 18, 2023
    WORK
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    Image from BPTrends

    I definitely didn’t know what the heck I was doing when I first became a manager way back in 2004. I was just the least bad person to fill a needed role. But over almost 2 decades of managing technical teams, I have read a lot and learned a lot from great managers around me. I’ve come to believe that there are a dozen+ resources that hit all the key points on how to be a great manager. I think these form the basis of a learning track for engineering management. I've listed them below, divided based on different stages of maturity.

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  • How to Create a Free, Private Knowledge Base

    Sunday, Jan 22, 2023
    TIPS
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    You can easily create your own, free, private knowledge base site with minimal effort. Here's how it works - you will capture your knowlede base notes in Markdown files, which get turned into a searchable website by Docusaurus, and then are published privately on the web via Gitlab pages. Then you can access and search them from anywhere.

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  • How to Run Emby in the Cloud

    Sunday, Nov 20, 2022
    TIPS

    I’ve been running Emby locally within our network on an old mini-pc because I’ve found it’s the easiest and most user-friendly way to share media within a family. However, when you have it inside your network, it’s harder to access from your phone and you can’t hook it up to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

    Emby logo

    I wanted to try hosting it externally to see if it would simplify things, but I couldn’t find a good resouce on how to do this. I eventually got it working and figured I’d share how to do it in case it helps others.

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  • Speedy meetings are awesome, but not the way Google created them

    Tuesday, Oct 18, 2022
    TIPSWORK

    Google introduced Speedy Meetings in 2011, which shortens meetings from 30 to 25 or 60 to 50 minutes. The intended goal was to allow you to “prep for your next meeting or get to your next appointment if you have a packed schedule.”

    Speedy Meetings

    Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, speedy meetings the way Google has created them just don’t work. The temptation to keep the meeting going until :30 or :00 is just overwhelming. Human nature leads to people to keep talking past the supposed speedy meeting end time.

    But there is a solution. Instead of ending meetings early, I’ve found it works much better to start meetings late! Wait wait, I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out.

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