History Worth Pondering

The Architect of Modern Algorithms by Susan D'Agostino

What's So Great About A Sabbatical?

Reflecting On 8 Months Of Full-Time Self-Study by Jan Heuermann

Even if you're not pondering a sabbatical, I'd be willing to bet some of the engineers you manage are.

Provocation

“find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble … good trouble, necessary trouble.” – John Lewis
Framing for @duretti ‘s #LeadDevBerlin talk on affecting change 🙏

— Lena Reinhard (@lrnrd) December 6, 2019

Free Book I'm Reading

Distributed Systems by Maarten vaan Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Gear Review

New 16" MacBook Pro Review by Kaya Thomas

You had me at "Apple finally fixed the keyboard".

Thoughts On Structuring An Engineering Team

If you need N teams to work together on something, but even one can block it by not doing the work, then it will never ship unless it’s everyone’s top priority for a quarter.

— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) December 14, 2019

Canonical Concept Refresher

Conway’s Law on Wikipedia

Remote Work Again

I love the clarity (and non-prescriptiveness!) in this post about identifying what you need in your remote work life, and how to communicate where needed to help those needs get met:

A hierarchy of remote worker needs – by @li3n3 ✨https://t.co/AAWSPd2Ox0 pic.twitter.com/4rmLqWgjOl

— Lena Reinhard (@lrnrd) December 13, 2019

Tweet And Responses Worth Pondering

Continuous integration and deployment with Bazel at Dropbox

Interesting article, which explains how despite using a monorepo, Dropbox manages microservices-esque deployments. I wonder how other orgs using monorepos do this. https://t.co/UqZ5op49Hq pic.twitter.com/l1MD0OnGJk

— Cindy Sridharan (@copyconstruct) December 13, 2019

On Asking Questions

What I've learned over 10 years on Stack Overflow by Matt Bierner

Quote On What Making Software Is Like

"We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
— Ellen Ullman

— Devon ☀️ on vacation! (@devonzuegel) June 8, 2019

Epic Tales Of Software Past

Mute me for a bit if you don’t like long diatribes about startup debacles but this reminds me of a story (1/n) https://t.co/lHuAF0ruOK

— Dan McKinley (@mcfunley) November 13, 2019

Advice On Pull Requests

Tip: Avoid large pull requests. Find ways to break them up into smaller ones. Small PRs can be:

* Easier to review. Intent is clearer and mistakes are more obvious
* Less likely to conflict with others work
* Compatible w/large new features - e.g behind a flag
* Not a panacea :)

— Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) December 15, 2019

The Chaos Monster

Live Like a Hydra by Buster Benson

One of my concerns when I started Seven For Sunday was that I might stumble into one of the morasses out there. One of those is the mass of self-help, hustle culture advocacy on Medium. This is a post straight out of that genre, nonetheless I think it's worth recommending. It meanders over several topics, each of which has a few nuggets for how we approach engineering leadership. Chaos monster ate my lunch a lot in 2019, and I'm going into 2020 with getting better at containing the beast as my top professional goal.

Questions Your Candidates Are Going To Ask You

8 Questions You Should Ask Your Employer Before Taking the Job by Indrek Lasn