2022#08 Readings 🇺🇦🌻
3 minutes read | 573 words by Ruben BerenguelMeetings galore.
Starting 1st March I have officially changed to management track, as the team lead for the Data Platform team. It’s not a new role (I did that in my previous company), but now I have more people to interact with, more teams to talk to and more stakeholders to keep happy. A fun challenge.
Optimal quitting
Excerpt from a recent book. It doesn’t give away how to determine optimal quitting, only what it is. A pity, I have enough books to read already.
What Do Good Managers Do?
This is something I have always wondered, too. Even works for bad managers…
Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid
At last! I had been a watcher of this feature request for a while. I vastly prefer graphviz to Mermaid, but mermaid is closer to markdown and (for most use cases) easier.
How to Build Your Personal Productivity Stack
Currently, most of my stack (aside from email) is in Obsidian. Even the beginnings of some personal dashboards, built with the Dataview and Tracker plugins.
Spark Advanced Topics
This is a very useful resource by Holden Karau to help you with your Spark job(s).
🔊 Sid Meier’s Memoir
It’s not the best game designer memoir/biography I have listened or read (that would be one of Mechner’s Making Of books) but it was enjoyable and would recommend it.
What you give up when moving into engineering management
Your product as a manager is people. Your main goal is to scale through developing your team and setting them up for success when solving problems.
I relearned typing to save my wrists
I followed a similar path in ergonomy, but in two steps. First, I learned Colemak to get my typing to be more fluid and using all fingers, then I switched to a split keyboard (sadly broken now, I’m now awaiting a Keyboardio Model 100).
The simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people
I’m glad to know I’m not the only weirdo around. For a while I used a system based in the supermemo algorithm (I think revision 2, implemented in a spreadsheet more or less) to keep in touch with people in a way that maximised their remembrance of me (it indirectly also improves my own, which is good). You could argue this loses “something” of the real connection, but if I didn’t actually care I wouldn’t go to such lengths.
Staff Software Engineer Responsibilities
One that seems to be buried in the lede is that a Staff SE should be on top of most technology decisions around their area of influence.
KPIs Every Data Team Should Have
It’s just a few lists, but these are good lists.
