Sven Decker

Building high-performing tech teams

[swyx @aiDotEngineer WF @swyx]

we are going to have to Rebuild So. Much. Infra. for the age of Software Factories

[fofr @fofrAI]

This is exciting and necessary from @pbakaus.

“Excellent work is not one-shotted. It comes from clear intent, relentless iteration, judgment, and craft”

[Ramp Labs @RampLabs]

https://t.co/C4QSksoEbj

[Eric Glyman @eglyman]

https://t.co/0VslhlEfIe

[David George @DavidGeorge83]

https://t.co/quEUSl9tYC

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

yeah it is but everything in moderation. Internally we always talked about main quest and side quests.

Everyone should focus on the main quest, and moderately or not all on side quests.

Both quest lines feel productive but only one of them advances the main mission of the company.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

https://t.co/8SUIbgmU7w

[George Sivulka @gsivulka]

https://t.co/fdKmCTuaUk

[dax @thdxr]

sent this to the team today

everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible

and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that

[Charity Majors @mipsytipsy]

"There is a difference between employer suicide and employee suicide"

and "If a company is having problems adopting AI, then that is a company issue, not an employee issue."

woke up to a solid new post from @GeoffreyHuntley 🪦 https://t.co/yHPatGeMg9

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

https://t.co/uNCLciJ6Rd

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/bDCdltFo0A

[Zain Hoda @zain_hoda]

https://t.co/jLDNmgG3fY

[Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig]

This is genius in its simplicity.

They’re not using exotics. It’s just… best practices.

Ten years of “shard everything, adopt NoSQL, go distributed, sacrifice a goat to CAP theorem,” and here’s @OpenAI serving a billion users with “have you tried adding read replicas?”

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

https://t.co/RU33K24RsJ

[Animesh Koratana @akoratana]

https://t.co/9W4ldW04zs

[sunil pai @threepointone]

Do things quickly
---

That thing that you're convinced will take 6 months? DOA. Instead, make a plan that ships most of it in 6 weeks. You'll get the buy-in for 6 months if it's worth it.

6 weeks to delivery? Break it down into 6 1-week sprints. Setup a quick review every Monday.

A 1 week sprint? Ok we can't do meetings to decide every detail, so quickly sketch out what you're doing that week, and get to work.

Day 1 of the sprint? Ok, let's hack something that just works for the day. So you can show something shitty by the end of the day.

Suddenly, there's no sprint culture. You just do things everyday.

You get effectively infinite course correction. Things that aren't important just get cancelled. You get to show incremental progress on a daily basis. There's no time for politicking, you only want to ship. You get the joy of infinite dopamine hits. You get a reputation as the demo god, always ready to show what's changed. There's no stress of hitting arbitrary long term deadlines, the only thing that matters is what's happened. Prioritising becomes your mantra. Sorry, we're not doing a rewrite because twitter said it's cool. We only want to move forward.

You're done by 5pm every day because that's what you've planned for. If it didn't happen then you planned badly for the week; correct assumptions and move forward. Everyone's on your side because you've reduced risk. Who gives af about jira/linear/github? There's code, and there's not code. You make a text file on your dekstop with "things to do" and "things done". You're done when there's nothing left in "things to do".

Just do it, dammit.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Couple of observations on this poll:

1. Time to maximum impact received <5% votes. Everyone would agree that maximum impact is the supposed ultimate goal. So consider what you might do differently in your decision making & execution if you kept time to maximum impact in the back of your mind, while maintaining your desire to ‘move fast’.

2. A clear majority of companies that pat themselves on the back for moving fast in practice optimize first for
“(B) Time to write the first line of code” not for “(C) Time to shipped feature” which got the most votes in the poll.

In fact, it’s because they optimize for “(B) Time to write the first line of code” that they don’t actually ship the feature as fast as possible.

Experienced engineering managers, tech leads, and product managers understand this, but the pressure to say “yes, the engineers are already building this feature” to upper management is often too high.

The other issue here is the false notion that if an engineer isn’t always writing code, you are wasting precious eng time and you are therefore a bad PM / EM, so you must get them to start writing code asap.

[🎭 @deepfates]

Reading a book about competitive gaming by a professional Street Fighter champion and he writes like freaking Nietzsche

[Can Vardar @icanvardar]

user_id, userId or userID?