Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. - SØREN KIERKEGAARD
A Process for Year End Reflection and Goal Setting
It’s December 31, time to reflect and resolve. I’m incredibly goal-oriented and nearly always set a New Year’s resolution or two, but a year ago, I moved the process into much longer-term thinking. This year, I set both “life goals” and 2019 goals because a colleague (h/t Dobromir) shared his life goals with me. I... Continue Reading →
Engineering management as a distributed system
"My utilization is too high! My latency is increasing, I've got too many cache misses, my search results aren't relevant, I'm way above the threshold and all my alarms are going off, especially in the middle of the night." Ever feel this way as an engineering manager - that your compute and storage resources aren't... Continue Reading →
Video: “Keeping up your technical skills as a manager”
Video of my talk, "Keeping up your technical skills as a manager," is now posted on YouTube, along with the whole playlist of all talks from #calibratesf. https://youtu.be/K9emor4-ewU It was an amazing speaker lineup - here are just a few of my fellow presenters. https://twitter.com/kathleencodes/status/1177703695921770496 And yes - it was just as much fun as... Continue Reading →
Should I become an engineering manager? Seven questions for reflection
One of the most common questions I hear when mentoring engineers is whether a person should pursue engineering management. I usually take this to mean that they are actually looking for a leadership role, and I want to help them discern whether that might be as a primarily technical leader or as a managerial leader.... Continue Reading →
Wise Words
Self-esteem is the ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in regard. - ESTHER PEREL
Do you even code anymore? How to keep up your technical skills without annoying your team(s)
In a crowd of attendees at the O’Reilly Velocity conference this month, I asked a room of mostly managers how many of them had coded within the past week; within the past 6 months; or within the past year (including side projects, open source contributions, etc.). With all three of those categories, we had about... Continue Reading →
How To Get A Job At Twitter
[Photo: ViewApart/iStock] I was recently interviewed by Michael Grothaus of Fast Company for my perspective as a senior hiring manager in engineering on how we hire engineers at Twitter. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve invested both in a great candidate experience as well as in managing bias. More details in my interview here: Fast... Continue Reading →
5 Leadership Skills Every Engineer Needs
I had the privilege of giving this talk at the North Bay Python conference this weekend. What a great, supportive crowd! On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcO-U1leTho&sns=em Slide Deck: http://bit.ly/2iEqc6O Here's the interactive word cloud the audience contributed to during the talk: https://twitter.com/kathleencodes/status/937403090231107584
