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Category: leadership

The Hot Seat

The Hot Seat

As a startup CTO, one of the most challenging parts of my job is being on call.  As the teams technology lead, I am responsible for all aspects of our technology, and that covers DevOps. When the site is experiencing abnormally high load, and you get paged, it's time to jump into the fray.  Into the hot seat.  Where every second counts.  I often chat with DevOps engineers at meetups, each has Read the article >>
4 Affirmations on the Grit of Leadership

4 Affirmations on the Grit of Leadership

Just a quick post today.  I've been thinking a lot about the grit of leadership, persistence, mindfulness, and will lately.    Some observations on some traps of leadership: It's easy to quit; harder to be persistent. Derisiveness is easy; it's hard to be thoughtfully decisive. It's easy to ignore the hard conversations; harder to have them. What separates an athlete from the rest of Read the article >>
Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness

Software development is a somewhat abstract process and, often, estimating the path from feature ideation to completion is an exercise in guesswork.  An unfortunate fact of life as a web engineer is that building blocks involved are often undocumented, unsupported, incomplete, and/or convoluted.  If, like me, you work in a distributed environment, your different team members surely have different Read the article >>
The default state is failure

The default state is failure

After 4 years of building, fixing, and managing software, I've come to realize that the default state of everything is failure. Chances are that your fancy feature doesn't work when you first ship.  That new process probably has plenty of holes in it.   Everything is a work in progress, and your world is in perpetual beta. In startup life, there are TWO worlds you live in.  One that celebrates Read the article >>
Dialogue

Dialogue

I'm a classically trained programmer.  That means that in school, they taught me C++, Java, Lisp, and a handful of other techie stuff.  There was a class which included 'the lifecycle of applications', but, beyond that, I've never been really trained in any of the softer skills associated with software engineering. One of the things that I've learned in the past year is the importance of dialogue Read the article >>
Management by Thoughtfulness

Management by Thoughtfulness

Steve Jobs would practice Management By Walking Around. It's somewhat ironic that the once-a-smelly-hippy turned CEO of Apple with no business school experience, and an attitude of anathema to traditional management school, would practice such a commonly-espoused management technique. Peer coding at StepOut. It's simple but powerful technique - just get up from your desk, walk around, roll up your Read the article >>