Sip coffee, write code, talk shit#1
The whole point of these article is a rant, hopefully a bit more routine one. So lately I got the role of leading a team. My animal brain tried to super-impose what I know with what I thought I was trying to solve. Yeah, it dont work like that man!
You cannot bring the same level of control and pace to your team as you do as an individual
As an individual you have curated each and everything carefully to your own needs:
- Your cherry-picking techniques
- Your aliases
- Your PR templates
- You deployment workflows
- etc etc etc
And all of that is very fast. But what I realized was that the impact that I needed to create was not on processes but how to make processes more worthy of investment. How to get the value from these processes. Value could be anything like:
- faster rollback time in case a buggy code get’s in.
- crap tonne of unit tests/or none 😏
- how to increase developer productivity
- what is developer productivity in the first place?
- what are we even trying to do?
- etc etc etc
But yeah first thing that helped was matrices. Yeah, like these types
Basically, there are tonnes of such matrices you can use to find out the direction your team is heading, what are the blockers, are there any non high-value work your team is doing, if you need to re-prioritize and re-align.
The second was reading about grunt work aka manual work needed to keep the system going, more can be read via sre.google , now this is gonna be fun and frustrating to find out because there will be the gunky heavy gears have been in motion for years that seem to be working. But if all goes well and business demands shoot up, the tech team would be in deep sh*t in terms of scalability.
But hey at least some work is done. Who knows maybe this is the first step any lead takes. I’ll try to keep this thing updated, let’s see… Until next time 😄
