Engineering Manager at Automattic, Cate Houston (@catehstn) offers some great insight for managers (that equally apply to anyone providing advice as a mentor, consultant or friend). Since it’s a short article, I’m not going to give any spoilers here.

A lot of first-time engineering leaders can play the over-assertiveness card as a way to highlight their technical expertise. I’ve seen first hand when this spectacularly backfires when the team (who typically have better context and therefore solutions) starts to ignore the leader. Founder Coach, Dave Bailey (@davesuperman) offers some good advice about finding the balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.

If you don’t know Duretti Hirpa (@duretti) go follow her on twitter. I’ve seen some of her talks and she’s got great advice to offer and super entertaining. Complete with an amazing laugh too 😂 This article explores a little bit about what it means to be a Staff Engineer (the excellent website offers many other stories too!)

It’s rare you get to read a play-by-play refactoring like this, so it’s great to see Clare Sudbery (@ClareSudbery) publish this article on http://martinfowler.com. I ❤️ one of the opening lines too, “This is not intended to demonstrate perfection, but it does represent reality.”

Donald Knuth is a legend in tech and his famous books, the “Art of Computer Programming” are so well known, they have their own Wikipedia page 😅! Although a slightly longer article, I loved hearing about insights into his writing process, where TeX came from and more. This is a worthy read to learn about one of the many giant’s shoulders we stand upon today. Thank you to Susan D'Agostino (@susan_dagostino) for publishing this article.

Looking back at history is important to understand why we have the things we have today. Hillel Wayne (@hillelogram) publishes has a fun article looking at how (mostly) past languages have shaped the current set of programming languages we have today.

This is a very sad to hear John Horton Conway passed away due to complications with COVID-19. His “Game of Life” is such a fascinating example used a lot when studying chaos and complexity. This article is a memo from Princeton where Conway taught until 2013.

Wow! This is pretty impressive news from the folks over at GitHub. 👏

A lot of engineering leaders need to fill a gap or sometimes take on a Product role for a variety of reasons. This article from Sara Ownbey Chipps (@SaraJChipps) shares a nice matrix of various approaches used by various product teams at Stack Overflow to fuel product decisions based on customer use/feedback.

GitHub continues to share how the distributed organisation works. In this next article, Laura Heisman (@LauraHeisman) shares some insight from Senior Product Owner Ben Balter (@benbalter). Ben emphasises successful remote work requires an async-first culture. Some good tips in there for companies with a face-to-face culture to consider 🤔

Firstly I want to be clear - this article I’m including is something I strongly discourage use of. It’s a great example of what NOT to do as a leader and also what NOT to measure (includes Lines of Code, Velocity, etc). I’m including here for you to think about how this enables micromanagement, measuring of activity instead of outcome (not desirable!) and I’m sorry if any of you have to use it… At first I thought it was an April’s fools joke, but it seems like they’re serious 🤮. Check out this twitter thread if you want to see some other reactions.

A lot of you will be spending time in virtual meetings and I haven’t come across a lot of advice that focuses on this topic, so sharing it here wider. Beth Andres-Beck (@bethcodes) offers some very practical and useful advice from the basics, to facilitating and improving accessibility.