You don’t have to read it, but you just might learn something.
Leading Thought
Prime
the musings of a designer on what he loves about design and what he’s learned along the way
Absolutely blown away by this. While this is targeted toward designers, so much of it resonated on both a personal and professional level. I can’t imagine how many times I would read a point and have to stop for a moment to gather my thoughts.
Written by Fabricio Teixeira, a designer I recently started following on Twitter, there is so much love put into this distillation of lessons learned over 20 years in digital product design. Whether you are a designer, software engineer, architect, or any other profession, so much here should inspire you to look at what you do and why you do it, and then strive for more. To be more. To want more. It’s so easy to become numb to the work we do – work that once felt important or aspirational – that when we stumble into a piece of work like this, it can shake you.
There be genius here.
Expand your references. Stop reading design blogs to learn about design (I know of all people I shouldn’t be the one saying that, but hey). Make a list of your idols and find out who their idols are. Follow those folks. Hopefully none of them are digital product designers.
Psychological Safety: Static work vs Generative work
Tim ‘Agile Otter’ Ottinger posted this article about ‘Work as Imagined vs Work as Done’ – a worthwhile read in it’s own right – which linked to this article about how people end up making themselves indispensible at work, whether consciously or unconsciously, as a way of protecting themselves from cuts. The problem is that these same folks often become bottlenecks.
You probably know this person: everyone panics when they plan a vacation; they’re the only person that knows how to perform certain tasks; this person is always, officially or unofficially, on call. This may even be you. While this may happen in a growing organization organically, often this is because there is low psychological safety in the organization and people are either afraid of being disposable, or afraid to say that they have too much responsibility and are constantly under stress.
There are more posts that seem worth diving into. Definitely looks like Psychological Safety a newsletter worth subscribing to.
It’s probably impossible to avoid entirely, but the trick is to identify when it’s happening and mitigate it. In psychologically safe teams, this is a continuous process; I work with teams where the phrase “I think I’m becoming Brent” is often heard – and it catalyses a valuable conversation about how to share the knowledge, protect and remove the bottleneck, and protect the team and the work.
Common management failures in developing individual contributors
Many technical leaders are great at moving out of the individual contributor role. Many are not. If you are an engineering leader, you owe it to yourself to give this a read. You may just find that informal leadership is the way you want to lead.
When I was an engineer, I thought I wanted to lead a team because that was the path forward, to more promotions, more chances to guide a project, more opportunities to influence other engineers. When I got there, I had a difficult time being a leader because I still wanted hands on keyboard and was splitting my focus, excelling at neither one. I decided to leave formal leadership for many reasons, but primarily because I like to write code and figure out problems.
Often you will hear that you don’t need a leader title to be a leader. As time progressed, I found this to be true. As your skills grow, you have an opportunity to influence many things: people, projects, processes, and more. This is the track of the senior engineer, and it’s critically important that your individual contributors, your engineers, have a path of growth and promotion that parallels your formal leader path, including pay and benefits.
For many people, the path into leadership is similar to mine. They believe this is the only way to get ahead, but still really want to be individual contributors. So, they struggle. Struggle to focus on engineer growth; struggle to delegate; struggle to be the force multiplier they could be if they weren’t so busy being a force additive. Listen to Dr. Laurence J. Peter, inventor of The Peter Principle, explain what that is (it rings very similar).
…make sure that you aren’t trying to be a senior engineer who has direct reports. If your heart is in the code and systems, perhaps you should be on that technical track yourself! Otherwise, remember that your job is now about generating leverage by developing your team, which means delegating the technical work to them while helping them identify other skills they will need to successfully grow as an engineer.
Why I Don’t Use OKRs
If you’ve ever read the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr, then you probably felt the passion Doerr has for the framework developed by Andy Grove when he was at Intel. The success Intel had with OKRs, and then later Google, are the stories that make other companies flock to the process. Unfortunately, as the author of the article points out, most of these companies fail to recognize how big a shift it is from what they are used to.
Presented are some good examples of the questions an organization needs to ask itself before taking on OKRs with any hope of success. Key takeaways: If you can’t measure your objectives, you can’t do OKRs. If you don’t have effective top-to-bottom communication, you can’t do OKRs. If you think that OKRs are for measuring employee performance, you shouldn’t do OKRs.
Coming Soon
axe-con 2023
(Mar 15 - Mar 16, 2023 | Virtual)
If Digital Accessibility (A11y) is your thing, then this conference is for you – and it’s FREE! I’ve attended in the past and there are always great talks; this year looks like no exception. Included in the speakers is Imani Barbarin whom I’ve followed on Twitter for quite a while. She runs crutchesandspice.com and always has honest thoughts on both the abled and disabled communities.
Humble Bundles
Think Like a Programmer Book Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Electronic Frontier Foundation – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $40 you get 18 titles, including:
- Write Great Code, Volume 1: Understanding the Machine
- Write Great Code, Volume 2: Thinking Low-Level, Writing High-Level
- The Art of Clean Code
- Think Like a Programmer
- Data Structures the Fun Way
- And more!
Beginners Web Development Software Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Girls Who Code – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $25 you get 20 Pluralsight courses, including:
- HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: The Big Picture
- Front-End Web Development Quick Start With HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript
- Optimizing and Deploying a Website
- JavaScript Best Practices
- Creating Page Layouts with CSS
- And more!
Accessibility (A11y)
Getting Started With Accessibility for React
Even if you aren’t a React developer, there is some great stuff in here about accessibility in general that you can apply to your apps. The author covers topics like Page Titles in Single Page Apps, Focus, Rerendering, Semantic HTML, The Accessibility Tree and more. Definitely something worth looking at if you do front-end work
It can be easy to build up the idea of coding accessibly in our heads into something so large and intimidating that we can always find an excuse for putting it off. But in reality, as I hope that I’ve demonstrated here, accessible code is just a series of small to moderate adjustments to your development and testing process that are all absolutely do-able by developers of all experience levels.
Engineering
Regular Expressions make me feel like a powerful wizard - and that’s not a good thing
This is a truth bomb. If you’ve ever worked with Regular Expressions (RegEx), you know how painful it can be to get them right when writing them. On the flip side, reading them is generally no picnic, either. Sure, there are things to help like adding copious comments or wrapping it in a well-named function, but the author’s point is solid: code for the everyman; avoid RegEx unless there is a really strong case for it (then think again).
I know what you’re thinking: “This guy’s too stupid to get regular expressions!” Yes. Yes I am. So are most people.
7 Awesome Free APIs for Your Next Node.js Project
This is a pretty great blog post not only of APIs that you can use to build a project to learn from, but also ideas for projects to build for each API. Don’t like those ideas? Combine multiple APIs and come up with something truly original!
Formik Works Great; Here’s Why I Wrote My Own
If you work in React (I don’t and UI isn’t my strong suit), then you may have used Formik for building validated forms. Unfortunately, as the author points out, Formik doesn’t seem to be actively maintained and has 642 issues and 151 open pull requests. While it may be a good library, these types of stats probably mean it isn’t something you want to put into your production environment. Enter HouseForm.
HouseForm is a field-first, Zod-powered, headless, runtime agnostic form validation library for React. It runs just as well in React Native, Next.js, or even Ink.
The author provides great information about what he loves about Formik, as well as some issues. He includes alternative libraries with pros and cons, showing exactly why the decision was made to build out something new. Even without knowing much about front-end tech, it’s apparent that serious homework was done, with a lot of thought put into what they want and why.
If you are looking for a replacement to Formik, or looking for an OS project to contribute to, HouseForm may be just the thing you’re looking for.
Teams
The Myth of Losing Social Capital in Hybrid and Remote Work
I picked up on this specifically because it was posted on the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website. It’s interesting to see a post here describing companies like Google and Apple as traditionalist with leaders who are stubborn and old school It’s also interesting to see Amazon, Nationwide, Deloitte, and Applied Materials on the list of companies deemed progressive.
I can say that my team, which is almost entirely remote, work really well together and probably communicate more than teams I’ve been a part of on site. Why? Remote, people have the option to tune in when needed and spend time focused at others. In the office, with open floor plans, many people spend time plugged into headphones to tune out distractions, are more subject to interruptions from drive-bys, or have anxieties ramped up for any number of reasons. We also have several cross-team meetings that help to connect people as well, helping to spread culture and enhance social capital.
While not everyone wants to work remotely – extroverts gain energy from groups and should have an option to go into a collaborative space – the world has shifted. People have realized that not driving not only saves time and money, but helps the environment. Having more time for family, volunteering, or just doing things we enjoy seems to be a major motivator for people expressing intent to leave companies that refuse to evolve. Listen to your teams. Figure out how to work better using techniques like those described in this article. If your culture is dependent on in-person collaboration, it may be time to reexamine and understand if you have a strong culture, or people playing along because they feel like they are being watched for the right response.
So no, hybrid and even fully-remote work don’t have to mean the loss of social capital. These work arrangements only lead to weakened connections if stubborn, old-school leaders try to force office-centric methods of collaboration onto the new world of hybrid and remote work.
3 New Studies End Debate Over Effectiveness Of Hybrid And Remote Work
Good article from Forbes about remote working with supporting studies about how productivity is actually higher for remote workers. In addition, remote workers report less stress, more focus, are happier and healthier, and tend to stay in their jobs longer.