Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco didn’t include a bibliography in Peopleware, so I swept through the book and produced one for curious readers. (Sorry for the bad formatting. Here’s a life tip: never use a CMS that promises continued development. Just grab one that already works.) Free Articles Hawthorne Effect Denver International Airport Baggage Handling System The Satir Change Model, by Steven Smith IBM’s Black Team “Inside the Japanese Software Industry”, by Denji Tajima and Tomoo Matsubara ...

I just finished reading that old software classic, Peopleware. The first chapter is “Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing,” and hooked me immediately. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tim Lister & Tom DeMarco Chapter 15 talks about Leadership as Work Extraction v. Leadership as Service. This ties into what I know of management spans. For years MBAs thought that the ideal number of direct reports was around 5-7 (which matches what psychologists know about working memory), but the idea of increasing that number means that managers have to start leading instead of micromanaging. See this HBR paper: More Direct Reports Make Life Easier by Ron Ashkenas (HBR). ...

Mark Richards runs the Developer to Architect website, and puts out a video every Monday. He has helpfully categorized them. I watched all the videos in the “Soft Skills” category and took notes. Gaining Technical Breadth Everything in the world can be divided into three categories: What you know What you know you don’t know What you don’t know you don’t know Technical depth is “what you know”. Technical breadth is “what you know” + “what you know you don’t know”. (Sidenote: I’ve always thought of technical breadth as stuff you know at a high level, but never used in production.) ...

I’ve been reading about failures in distributed computing. A lot of it is thanks to Vaidehi Joshi’s Year of Distributed Computing at https://medium.com/@vaidehijoshi . Here’s a small summary of what I’ve learned. A fault is a flaw in the system. It leads to an error, which is when a program is in a bad state. That results in a server failure. Hierarchy of faults Transient - Occurs once and leaves (like a Panda) Intermittent - Occurs sometimes. Permanent - Always occurs. Types of Errors I don’t think there is a concept of error types. ...

Here are my notes for week 2 of my product management education. This week is all about metrics, goals, and strategy, with a dive into Pirate and HEART metrics. A metric measures progress towards a goal. The PM should only focus on features that help achieve that goal, although there will be multiple goals to juggle. Pirate (AARRR) Metrics Pirate metrics are about measuring the user’s lifecycle. Acquisition - How users find you. Activation - When users have their first defining experience. Retention - How often a user returns. Revenue - How you make money. Referral - How users are recommending the product. You want to have measurements in each stage. You want to balance them. Some metrics are destructive pairs. Like acquisition and retention (it’s easy to spike a new-users metric in ways that won’t increase retention at all). ...

I’ve started an online Product Management class because, I dunno, I like learning new, non-coding things related to my job. I’ll be posting all my notes here. A PM effectively solves user problems while meeting business needs. (Product manager is not the mini-CEO of the user. We are responsible for the success or failure of the product.) A PM knows that there are questions that need answering before development starts. ...

In the aftermath of GE’s price fixing scandal, we learned that GE executives had a culture of winking while they told subordinates not to break the law. Sometimes. Each salesperson had to interpret the word and the wink, and the occasional lack thereof, according to their own internal rules. Effective communication was, effectively, absent. Suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the owner of a company who orders his subordinates to obey the antitrust laws has such poor communication with himself that he does not really know whether he wants the order to be complied with or not. If his order is disobeyed, the resulting price-fixing may benefit his company’s coffers; if it is obeyed, then he has done the right thing. In the first instance, he is not personally implicated in any wrongdoing, while in the second he is positively involved in right doing. What, after all, can he lose? ...

NEDD is a one day conference in Cambridge. It’s an inexpensive way to learn about the cutting edge of database research. These are my notes on each speaker. Large notes I wasn’t as out of my depth as I thought I was going to be. I owe it all to Distributed systems theory for the distributed systems engineer by Henry Robinson The storm blew open a locked door, but it wasn’t at a dramatic moment in a talk. Disappointed in god for the missed opportunity. ...

I’m not in management, but damned if I don’t love a good management paper. Today it’s Frederick Herzberg’s “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees,” where I learn to not kick an employee. There are two pieces of vocab I learned reading this article. The first is motivators versus hygiene. This is the difference between doing good things and not doing bad things. Herzberg talks of hygiene the way I talk of table stakes, it’s the bare minimum required to have an employee, like not kicking them. To quote executive coach Chris Rock, “you don’t get credit for doing something you’re supposed to do.” This paper talks about advantages and disadvantages of literally kicking an employee. ...

There is one scene that gets referenced several times in Rapid Development by Steve McConnell as an example of a hugely productive team. Witness, 1985, Barn Raising Scene