Through the stack / 01-09 (Week 13)
This is "Through the Stack", a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organisations. This publication is aimed at sharing thoughts and content that are relevant to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com .
This week ...
... we saw a lot of posts of interest for senior engineers, staff level ones in particular or ones who have to manage teams of engineers and hire more.
It's a lot about how to work together, how to hire people.
Then, we will finish on a lighter note with a post that brings us back and through the early years of a product.
Staff level
First we stumbled upon a 2 years old article on "T shaped engineers" . As we recently posted an article on MentorCruise ("Two strategies to broaden your horizons") on a similar topic we found that one quite interesting. It covers the topic of T shaped engineers, describing them accurately as "in betweens" between generalists and specialists. It also covers the pros and cons. Quite a nice one to read and recommend to our junior engineers still looking for a path.
Leaddev is continuing to provide great content every week it's starting to be difficult to follow. This week, on the "growing engineers" theme there is quite a few posts to read. First a reflection on the rewards to grow junior engineers. The article is a bit short, as the author notes, but it's a great reminder of how taking of junior engineers isn't a copy and paste process nor a one size fits all but it has the potential to unlock greatness in the mentee.
Following this, a post on how to use coaching in these remote working times. For those of us leading teams working remotely it's good to read and hear how others are doing that. This article is especially good to get an overview of the author's approach and compare it to our own, or use it to shape one of our own.
There are many more in our bag but this week we are going to stop here for this section. And we would like to reach out to you, dear readers : what is your take on these topics ? Have you published content (or even tweets) about shaping our careers and mentoring people ? Reach out to us by email : through-the-stack@imfiny.com .
Ruby
As usual, we can't really help it : we keep finding some more good content about Ruby and its ecosystem. This week we found a nice article (ok, it's one year old) about using Minitest. For those out there writing tests Minitest is one great option and this article ("Assert yourself") will help getting the gist of it.
Another option to write tests with Ruby is RSpec. We (Imfiny) published a free course to help new comers to RSpec pick up the basics of it (its grammar). Feel free to drop us your feedback by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com .
Following Remote Ruby Episode 169 "Bridgetown 1.0 with Jared White" a little post caught my eye in my feeds : "Creating a simple post generator in Bridgetown". If you are curious about Bridgetown, this might be one way to get started.
Imfiny ?
This content is written and published by Imfiny, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and devops in the Cloud (AWS, GCP and others) as well as training and supporting teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).
We are available for 3 to 18 months contracts, contact us.We have courses available on https://learn.imfiny.com/ .
Illustration photo by https://unsplash.com/@hendrikpeter