Will Larson

Will Larson [1] is a favourite of mine. Some parts os his writing are still "one person's opinion" but a) has credentials to back up his opinions b) often he triangulates with other people to give more weight to his arguments. For example for Staff Engineer he did interviews with many Staff+ ICs c) is very humble and open about what he doesn't know or what is "the best of my knowledge" Overall I give him more credit than any internet rando. [1] https://lethain.com/

For reading, I'd recommend everything from Will Larson ( https://lethain.com ). As for attitude and behaviours for making the jump, it's a combination of actively looking for opportunities (that's the easy part), and positioning yourself as someone who is an obvious choice for such a position, which is basically when you consistently have an attitude and reputation of total ownership, supporting others, never complaining or taking it easy and instead always thinking and delivering at a wider scope, being the person people come to for making a decision on what and how to do, rather than a person who is being told what and how to do. Some people do all of that naturally. Lucky them. Others don't, and it's a journey to adjust. You don't need to be a "natural", but if you aren't you need to learn to behave like one before you can credibly go into a leadership position.

read this https://staffeng.com/book and decide which type of staff path you want to follow. the author Will Larson https://lethain.com/ goes into detail about all types of staff engineers also follow him on twitter

- https://diff.substack.com/ thoughtful analysis of finance and tech - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ a couple things on here I would say you actually need to read if you want to write code for a living - https://lethain.com/ great insights on engineering management patterns and antipatterns

The classics are all covered in other comments. For some hyper-relevant content (the sand to fill the in-between spaces filled up by big philosophies and principles), I've found Will Larson's blog (https://lethain.com/) and book (https://press.stripe.com/#an-elegant-puzzle) to be really useful. It provides tools for solving specific problems, and a language to discuss what's going wrong and what the solution looks like. https://lethain.com/durably-excellent-teams/ The concepts he covers in this post, in particular, have been invaluable.

Tech blogs I follow (and one I write): - Irrational Exuberance![1] by Will Larson (ex Digg, Uber, Stripe) - focuses on engineering management - Hillel Wayne’s blog [2] - software engineering and formal methods - The Pragmatic Engineer [3] - software engineering & tech lead topics, written by myself [1] https://lethain.com/ [2] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ [3] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/

I've found Will Larson's blog (https://lethain.com/) to be a great source on engineering management and technical leadership.

This is good stuff. I had missed Will's earlier article about AI strategy at his current company which is worth a read too: https://lethain.com/company-ai-adoption/

> Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles. Or doors. 25 years ago, Microsoft Redmond had a slogan: "Every dev a door". In early 2000s, it began to be two devs per room. We all know what happened since. Open offices save facilities concrete money per seat. Productivity lost from lack of deep work is not a line item anyone knows how to track. The "every dev a door" plus "pair programming" was shown by studies from groups like Pivotal Labs as being optimal for working code, but ... and a big but ... Companies intentionally optimize for things other than working code. You get what you measure and they measure what's easy instead of measure what matters. // See https://lethain.com/measuring-engineering-organizations/ but also https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/

This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in: - https://erikbern.com - https://lethain.com - https://commoncog.com - https://scattered-thoughts.net - https://danluu.com - https://ideolalia.com - https://staysaasy.com - https://collabfund.com - https://blog.nelhage.com - https://jacobian.org - https://equalventures.substack.com - https://defmacro.org - https://spakhm.com - https://apenwarr.ca - https://scarletink.com - https://benkuhn.net - https://cpojer.net - https://brandur.org - https://zeptonaut.com Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!

Ignore that this blog post says as a CTO / VP, some great role agnostic advice https://lethain.com/first-ninety-days-cto-vpe

Will Larson has a lot of excellent material and an upcoming book specifically targeted for engineering executives. Check out https://lethain.com/tags/executive/ and https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-engineering-executives/978109…

"An Elegant Puzzle" by Will Larson[0] is revelatory when it comes to leading a software engineering team. There is a solution to every organizational problem I've encountered in companies from single digits to thousands. That book alone, along with its intentional and organized bibliography is one of the best investments you can make in a tech career. Even without context on the size of your company, Larson's new "The Engineering Executive's Primer"[1] will surely make a valuable introduction too. [0] https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle [1] https://lethain.com/eng-execs-primer/

Highly recommend to check out this, regarding reading the P&L statements. https://lethain.com/profit-and-loss-statement/ Also check out the rest of his posts. I find them clearly written and useful.

Another favs list: https://lethain.com/some-of-my-favorite-technical-papers/

In addition to those technical books, I'd check out: * Staff Engineer- Great for the tech challenges beyond senior-level https://staffeng.com/book * The Manager's Path- Good even if you're not going to be a manager. Understanding their perspective makes you more effective https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491… * An Elegant Puzzle- What if distributed systems engineering, but with people? https://lethain.com/elegant-puzzle/

https://lethain.com/ - not strictly programming, but more of tech career and management-related.

False premise: "In general, buying and selling services and goods is all that interests modern society." Everything that follows from this is merely a thought experiment disconnected from reality and, as such, is unsafe. https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/ Any economic theory that doesn't account for gifting as the root of human behavior is going to start off skewed.

From the same author: - His book on engineering management, An Elegant Puzzle: https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/d… - His blog also discusses management: https://lethain.com/

Personally, I would recommend listening to Thoughtworks' Techonology Podcast. Their approach in general to running in the cloud is a pretty good one, which I'd characterize as platform engineering-centric. Anything Will Larsen writes is bound to be worth looking at and thinking about in the context of scaling cloud operations and operational complexity. His concept of the 'pierceable abstraction' is _absolutely key_ in my opinion. Additionally, the following blog posts are fairly good introductions: https://charity.wtf/2018/10/24/ten-platform-commandments/ https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html https://lethain.com/pierceable-abstractions/ https://srvaroa.github.io/paas/infrastructure/platform/kubernetes/clou… Hope that helps - had to dash this off fairly quickly.

Another great read on the topic is from Calm's CTO - https://lethain.com/build-vs-buy Some interesting takes 1) There's more to it than the 'risk' factor, consider value & costs! 2) Ask yourself "What can I actually build right now?" and be brutally honest before attempting any comparison (vs external tools) 3) Solutions that hinder your efforts to move any component outside their ecosystem are best avoided. These prove to be costly in the long run.

In my role as unofficial, self-appointed late-stage Digg historian [0], it's my belief that Digg ultimately had to change as the Google SEO changes had fatally wounded its near-profitability. Further, as a VC funded company it made the inevitable (and I think best for everyone involved) decision to modernize in an attempt to be a member of the Facebook, Twitter cohort rather than experience a long-term shrinking into mediocrity. [0]: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

Would highly recommend Irrational Exuberance! by Will Larson of Stripe engineering: https://lethain.com/tags/management/ He’ll be a publishing a book on this soon (An Elegant Puzzle) if you’re especially curious. Disclaimer: I work with Will at Stripe.

Check out Will Larson's post on time management. https://lethain.com/time-management/ He has a lot of great posts on leadership and management; here's a collection of some of them- https://lethain.com/rails-for-engineering-leadership/

And here is the follow-up: http://lethain.com/genetic-programming-a-novel-failure/

I was literally just looking into this yesterday because I've been lazy and haven't set up a good deployment process. I found this article http://lethain.com/entry/2008/nov/04/deploying-django-with-fabric/ I'm wondering what the best practices are and since I have so many people around me who use Capistrano I'm thinking about just going with that. Any words of advice?

Theres a great tutorial here - http://lethain.com/entry/2007/dec/04/two-faced-django-part-1-building-… - that uses Django to build a facebook app.

This is really not how most companies think about it. Unless you take an extremely broad view of what “management” is. As a term of art, used by people writing the JDs for “manager” jobs (source: have wrote those JDs), it specifically means having people reporting to you, being responsible for their productivity, growth, and development. The senior IC track does not (have to) involve management. It does involve a lot of communication, collaboration, and coordination, which may look like management if you squint. And there is overlap; in small companies, particularly startups, sometimes tech lead and manager hats are worn by the same person. But they are different roles. And particularly, to the point of the article, they are different career tracks. You might wear both hats for a bit, but most careers will end up specializing on one or other track. See https://lethain.com/ for lots of material on what it means to be a staff-plus IC, as well as engineering manager.

Agreed. I think the approach described here is promising. Most of the workflow is deterministic and includes safeguards, but an LLM is invoked in the one case where it's really useful. https://lethain.com/agents-as-scaffolding/

Yes. We have at least one team dedicated to identifying bugs and maintaining technical quality. For example they statistically analyze our CI runs to identify regressions. They find some subtle bugs that would be difficult to identify through one's own experience. https://lethain.com/managing-technical-quality/ discusses when it makes sense to build such a team.