8 posts tagged with "meta"

Manager-dom was not a sought-after status (though I admit to prior curiosity), but as with many other engineers-turned-managers, it found me anyway (Q3 2023). Being a team lead and then an architect came naturally and brought success for many years. Some of the skills translate well from those roles while other necessary capabilities tend to be underdeveloped. Nothing can truly substitute for the value of gaining experience and reflecting on it; here are a few resources that I have found useful in my journey so far, giving me new ideas to play with and questions to aid my reflection.

The plovers gather in their southern haunts. The long journey north. Migration.

Recently I ran across and old article from Phil Haack, about moving his blog to Jekyll using GitHub. And I realized that this is (or might be?) a perfect solution for managing content about the FlightNode project (though it will not be part of the platform itself).

There is a lot of work to do in terms of getting content up and getting it formatted. This is just the start of getting the framework going, so that I can get all the text and pictures out of my head and into documentation that other team members can use.

This is a technical blog, right? Why would I mention this virtue? In Management 3.0, Jurgen Appelo suggests in "Do-It-Yourself Team Values" that the various Agile, Lean, XP, etc. principles are, quite simply, virtues. Teams should pick a small number and focus on them. "Kindness" is not among the 50 virtues he suggests thinking about, but it should not come as a surprise that that my rationale for "kindness" will overlap that of many other virtues, such as "helpfulness," "mindfulness," "tactfulness," and "service." Each of these single words offers a slightly different window into an ineffable world of human goodness, and I choose "kindness" for this theory. First, a minor digression.

Hypothesis: at the beginning of their careers (and perhaps well into them), most software developers think written/verbal language skills are of little importance to their field. To the contrary: as with most science and engineering fields, where language arts and communications classes are seen as secondary at best, the truth is that communication skills are critical to success. Being "coherent" means that one is able to express himself in clear terms, logically and consistently. This ability is essential in both code and "regular" language.

Currently I'm working on updating the main blog at safnet.com with a refreshed look and feel (the design was last changed "way back" in 2008), then I'll move on to this technical blog. In the meantime, this garish built-in template will serve to remind me that work needs to be done.

New tech-blog entries have been rare primarily because I have been spending much of my technical-writing time on internal documentation at work: trying to build-up a thorough set of documentation in a SharePoint Wiki. Most of that content is proprietary, and would not be useful outside the company anyway. But I do hope to start posting comments here again soon, starting with a few entries after recently reading the classic The Mythical Man-Month.

As a teenager — and perhaps beyond — I thought I might achieve some great thing in this world. I wished for recognition, aspired for greatness and some exalted place, to strive with Tennyson's gods...

Death closes all: but something ere the end
Some work of noble note, may yet be done
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

So why the blog all the sudden? After hinting at it for years, I've finally decided to take the plunge. Rather than bore you with drawn out prose extolling the virtues of blogging and all that...