Through the stack 1.22 (week 42)
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 an important set of links for leaders. But I'd also recommend any engineer to read those.
This post is also published on our parent company's blog: https://blog.imfiny.com/through-the-stack-1-22/
Leadership
The leadership of a specific team or the whole engineering department involves a lot of soft skills. These are rarely taught in technical curriculums.
This week I want to use the opportunity given to me by a couple of articles to address one important skill set: taking a bit of altitude in the meetings to see the dynamics between people and then acting to rebalance them when needed.
First of all "Navigating power dynamics as a manager" by Pat Kua. This a great article. There is a lot to take from it: from a good background on the issues to a short list of what can be done to help. If you are in any role of leadership you should read about this and this a good article to get started.
As a complement, I'd recommend reading Matt Cooper's "How I support my reports' mental health as a new manager". It's a good post that goes on a complementary skill: supporting your reports' mental health.
And if you moved to a manager role recently you can also read Bruno Show's "Five things I wish I knew before becoming an engineering manager".
Software engineering
Before rushing into some really technical links we have a few links from Twitter and @allenholub.
One about sprint goals and one about estimates. More food for thought mostly. Especially to remind us that things such as "noEstimates" are the result of other efforts about how your team works.
Now, let's dig into technical topics.
I am really glad to have stumbled upon @arcnotes thread about Redis. If you use or are interested in Redis this is a great read. It not only covers the basics of Redis' architecture but also goes deeper than that. Their feed is also full of interesting links I have only browsed through quickly.
Of course, we have to talk about Ruby. A tweet from @NonyDutton (in August 2022) and a direct recommendation from @joemasilotti made me aware of the Ruby For All podcast. I haven't listened to the content yet but I have heard great things already so you should have a try and decide for yourself. If you do and find great episodes, please send me a line about it.
Puma 6.0 is out. There are some nice things in the upgrade so make sure to pass the word to your team if you are running Ruby apps.
Railsdevs is now available in French too. It's a great site to find Ruby developers.
Some weeks ago we talked about Snyk's post about Gems dependency management. On the same topic, Shopify's published an interesting piece about "Finding relationships between Ruby's top 100 packages and their dependencies".
We missed it a few weeks back but the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report is out. Google Cloud's DevOps Research and Assessment team published a related post talking about specifics.
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, ...).