My friend went to the doctor because he had trouble breathing. He thought he had heart trouble or lung cancer.He felt he was dying.The doctor asked him one question, “Do you work in tech?”He said yes. The diagnosis was stress. The doctor recommended he re-evaluate his life decisions. Like quitting his job. From the doctor’s […]
Nudged towards management
My friends and I have similar experiences transitioning from engineering to management. We were all technical leads given the opportunity. I’ve always thought about the reasoning behind that. Management is considered a different line of work from development. Technical mastery doesn’t imply skill in managing a team. When I became an engineering manager, I didn’t […]
Staying technical part 2
Following up from the previous article – here’s what I’ve done recently. I wanted to enhance my Golang skills, so I picked a few projects that would push me in multiple directions: I took KD-tree assignment from Stanford (http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs106l/handouts/assignment-3-kdtree.pdf) and translated the C++ code base into Golang. I also completed Lab 1 of MIT’s Distributed Systems class […]
The enhancer
If you’ve played bards from role playing games, they often have party buffs. The bard has weak combat skills and offensive magic capabilities. You don’t use the musical adventurer to one-shot a wight from existence with a burst of sunlight. Instead, you use bards to augment your team. If your team has 8 units, a […]
When do you automate?
If only I could figure out how to replicate every business task in software, I would have a company capable of running itself. I’ll be on an island in the Caribbean with money automagically flowing in to my bank account. Living the dream. Ok. Let’s return to reality. I don’t have everything automated. When I […]
Start with two and a half percent time to stay technical
“But I don’t want to give up coding!” I feel like staying technical is the equivalent of an existential crisis for engineering managers. I went through that. You don’t have to write code for the rest of your career, if that’s what you wish. For some engineering managers, this is a primary reason they took […]