Through the stack 1.21 (week 41)
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 organizations. This publication aims to share relevant thoughts and content 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 have a flurry of posts on the technical side but we still have a pair of links to great content on the leadership side too.
This post is also published on our parent company's blog: https://blog.imfiny.com/through-the-stack-1-21/
Leadership
I often consider mentorship to be a great way to foster leaders in your teams. B. George and Z. Clayton expose an interesting take along similar lines in "Successful leaders are great coaches", an article in the Harvard Business Review.
An interesting thread on twitter about the STAR method and interviews has led me to a post on the same topic by Will Larson aka @lethain: https://lethain.com/star-method/. For those who might not know him, he is the author of the Staff Engineer book.
Software engineering and security
Of course the following is aimed at selling some Tailscale's product but it has some interesting points to consider when exposing a database to the public internet. https://tailscale.com/blog/introducing-pgproxy/
If you rely on Terraform and trying to figure out a way to avoid destroying key infrastructure components you might be interested in https://doordash.engineering/2022/09/20/how-doordash-ensures-velocity-and-reliability-through-policy-automation/
Digging further in the Terraform rabbit hole I stumbled upon two food for thoughts articles from HashiCorp's blog:
- https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/dungeons-dragons-for-team-building: team building by using custom DnD campaigns
- https://www.hashicorp.com/tao-of-hashicorp a way to show and expose key foundations of their engineering culture
On the Ruby side, Arthur Trzop (from the excellent Knapsack) released a video last month about a way to hunt for flaky tests.
There was also "Good concerns" by @jorgemanru on how to use concerns in Ruby on Rails. It's a great intro to the concept and might be useful for many to pick it up.
Not yet on the watch list
Here follows sources of content that have popped up in my feed but I haven't decided if I want to keep them on the watch list.
- Harvard Business Review: related to the Havard University it has popped up a few times in my threads over the years. You can read, for free, a limited number of articles every month otherwise you can subscribe for a monthly fee to have unlimited access.
- Entrepreneur First, a startup accelerator program has started its own podcast https://www.joinef.com/stories/podcasts/
And in other news
Many houses and buildings were flooded recently in the USA and in other parts of the world. @olivierlacan documented his efforts to clean up. Interesting.
Epilogue
This is the end for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. There are quite some good reads in there and they might help you in your day-to-day work and beyond.
Don't hesitate to ping me through https://twitter.com/ThomasRiboulet_ or through through-the-stack@imfiny.com with content suggestions or comments.
Who are we, by the way?
This content is written and published by Imfiny/CloudPier22, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others). We also train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).
We have an upcoming course aimed at first-time Tech leads and CTOs on Maven: https://maven.com/thomas-riboulet/first-engineering-strategy.