Engineering Management

In this edition of Business of Coding, Quick Left CPO Joe Stump talks to Head of Engineering at Pinterest, Michael Lopp. Throughout this podcast, Joe and Michael talk about his new position as a manager at a pre-existing company. What are the first things you look to do when entering in as the outsider? Michael explains the importance of the company culture, and the two also discuss the possible red flags and green flags that a person should look for in the organization of a company. Listen to the full podcast here.

Business of Coding: Michael Lopp Head of Engineering at Pinterest

Gerald Chan, Chairman and CEO of Morningside Group, spoke at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as part of the Voices in Leadership series on September 9, 2015.
 
Watch the entire “Voices in Leadership” series at www.hsph.me/voices.
 
The Voices in Leadership webcast discussion series at Harvard T. H Chan School of Public Health invites leaders to speak about their experiences making decisions that affect global health. Highly interactive and candid, the series is produced in The Leadership Studio for a student audience. The high-definition webcast is streamed live and posted for future viewing. Students learn from experienced leaders about decisions that were effective, decisions that failed, and which decisions, if any, could have been made differently. Watch the entire series at www.hsph.me/voices.
 
Gerald Chan is the co-founder of Morningside, a private investment group with venture, private equity and property investments. In the life science sector, Morningside focuses on start-up biotechnology companies founded on novel scientific discoveries. Gerald serves on the boards of Advanced Cell Diagnostics, Stealth BioTherapeutics, Synchroneuron, Apellis, Atea, Kezar, Nucana, Aduro, VTI and Matrivax. Gerald is a member of the Global Advisory Council of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Dean’s Board of Advisors of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the advisory boards of the Cold Spring Harbor Conferences Asia, the Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center and the Columbia University Center for Radiological Research. He is a trustee of Fudan University in Shanghai and chairs the Board of Overseers of Morningside College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.
 
Gerald received his BS and MS degrees in engineering from UCLA, his Master’s degree in medical radiological physics and Doctor of Science degree in radiation biology from Harvard University. He did his post-doctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a fellow of the Leukemia Society of America. The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Glasgow in Scotland have conferred on him honorary degrees. He was elected to an honorary fellowship at Wolfson College of Oxford University.

Leadership in Innovation | Gerald Chan | Voices in Leadership

In this week's podcast Richard Seroter talks to James Shore, author of The Art of Agile Development and one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. Also on the podcast are Llewellyn Falco, creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests and co-founder of Teaching Kids Programming, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, inventor of Responsibility-Driven Design, as well as the author of books including Designing Object: Oriented Software and Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities and Collaborations.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - A lot of people know how to do TDD and refactoring for the back end, but not for the font, but the basics are the same.
 - The basics of Test-Driven Development are the same for the front or back end.
 - If you don't know what's wrong, you don't know how to fix it.
 - The most common code smells, according to Llewellyn Falco: Clutter, long lines, long methods, duplication, and inconsistency.
 - How do we make, in an agile way, the architectural work visible, and not ignore it?
 - How do you have an incremental architecture and get measurements? If I say to you I'm going to go away for six months and figure it out, that's not very measurable.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/1Pse2r1

1m:10s - The talk 'Agile Engineering for the Web' was about how do you bring typical Agile engineering ideas like TDD and refactoring to the front-end languages.
1m:33s - A lot of people know how to do these things on the back-end, but when you get to the front end a lot of people just throw up their hands.
2m:24s - I see CSS bugs all the time, because it's very hard to refactor CSS without breaking something.

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ. http://bit.ly/1Pse2r1

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Show notes

James Shore, Llewellyn Falco, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on TDD and Architecture

Greylock Talent Partner Dan Portillo sits down with Twitter Head of Revenue Engineering Wade Chambers to discuss the art and science of managing technical teams. Wade shares personal insight into his development as a leader, and shares frameworks for structuring productive meetings, providing feedback, and optimizing for a high functioning organization.

Increasing Your Team's Capacity To Win with Dan Portillo and Wade Chambers | Greymatter

Following their podcast on managing technical teams, Greylock Talent Partner Dan Portillo and Twitter Head of Revenue Engineering Wade Chambers pair up for another podcast on recruiting and interviewing engineers. Wade outlines the processes he’s developed through years of management and building out teams at Yahoo, Proofpoint, TellApart and now Twitter.

The Art of Interviewing 10x Engineers with Dan Portillo and Wade Chambers | Greymatter

In this week’s podcast, Thomas Betts talks with Chris Richardson, a developer, architect, Java Champion and author of POJOs in Action. Before his workshop on Microservices w/ Spring Boot and Docker at QCon San Francisco 2016, Richardson took time to discuss his ideas on how to use DDD and CQRS concepts as a guide for implementing a robust microservices architecture.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - "Microservice architecture" is a better term than "microservices".   The latter suggests that a single microservice is somehow interesting
 - The concepts discussed in Domain-Driven Design are an excellent guide for how to implement a microservices architecture
 - Bounded Contexts correspond well to individual microservices
 - Event sourcing and CQRS provide patterns for how to implement loosely coupled services
 - When converting a monolith to microservices, avoid a big bang rewrite, in favor of an iterative approach

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2hZ8TM1

11m:51s - Microservices must be loosely coupled, usually creating a model with one database per service.
12m:45s - There is a business requirement to maintain data consistency across services, and using an event driven architecture is a good way to achieve that.
13m:38s - Event sourcing is specific technique for persisting domain objects as a series of events.
14m:11s - Just as transactions don’t like to be split across microservices, queries cannot simply join across multiple data sources. CQRS provides a solution that accommodates querying via microservices and materialized views.

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InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Chris Richardson on Domain-Driven Microservices Design

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Douglas Talbot, Head of Organisational Effectiveness for Ocado Technology, about the challenges and opportunities involved in creating a culture of innovation and agility in “a technology company that also does retail”.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Differences in the way IT is approached in different parts of the worldApplying ideas from agile, lean and Kanban to making business smarter by looking beyond process and practices to the people factors that make a difference to organisational outcomes 
 - Looking beyond the “latest consultancy model of choice” and taking an evidence-based approach to understand what really drives motivation and behavioural change in teams
 - Leadership is a game of providing clarity of vision and allowing teams to be self-organising and empowered
 - Cultural change is not really possible without commitment from the very topTop talent wants to work in places where there is a great culture, so culture becomes a competitive advantage

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2hQ5Kdg

8m:35s - Diverse backgrounds of the organisational effectiveness group
9m:05s - Engaging a behavioural economist and an organisational psychologist to ensure there is an understanding of the evidence around group dynamics and motivation
9m:25s - Looking beyond the “latest consultancy model of choice” and taking an evidence-based approach to understand what really drives motivation and behavioural change in teams
10m:10s - Examples of evidence found and changes made

Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2hQ5Kdg

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Deliberately Designing Culture at Ocado Technology

In this week’s podcast Wes Reisz talks to Neha Batra, a software engineer at Pivotal Labs. Neha spoke about pair programming in her recent QCon San Francisco 2016 presentation, and has taken time to discuss techniques to get started with the practice as well as tips for implementing it on your team. Neha also touches on vulnerability based trust and how it can help effectively build a trusting team environment.
Why listen to this podcast:

 - If you successfully start with pair programming, other tenants of XP are pulled along with you
 - Ways to get creative with remote pairing to make it work
 - The daily retro
 - Overcoming hesitance with managers when trying to implement pair programming full time
 - Vulnerability based trust building

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2i2a0sJ

How has Pair Programming Evolved Over the Years? 

6m:17s - A lot of the fundamentals are the same, but with XP we take it to the extreme to be able to do it  eight hours a day.
6m:24s - To pair for eight hours a day we adapt to a lot of other process to create a simpler way of working, giving us an easier level to default to.
6m:44s - We use phrases in the team to make sure we agree on a test, that there are no false positives, when to refactor etc. This helps us avoid accruing code debt since we don’t do code reviews.

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Neha Batra - Pivotal Labs Pair Programming

Jonas Bonér, CTO of LightBend and creator Akka, discusses using Akka when developing distributed systems. He talks about the Actor Model, and how every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system to be successful. 

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Akka is JVM-based framework design for developing distributed systems leveraging the Actor Model - an approach for writing concurrent systems that treat actors as universal primitives and the most successful model with abstraction has been streaming
 - Circuit breakers in Akka are a backup and retry policy; they protect you by capturing failure data and allow you to roll back 
 - Every Microservice needs to be viewed as a system, it needs to have multiple parts that run on different machines in order to function and be fully resilient - thus is a Microsystem
 - Two different trends have emerged when it comes to hardware and environments: one is the trend toward Multi-core, the is a movement toward virtualized environments and the cloud
 - Saga pattern of managing long running transactions in a distributed system fits very well with messaging style architectures

Notes and links can be found on: http://bit.ly/2kwB2eB

Akka
The Actor Model
When Akka and the Actor Model is the perfect choice
Circuit breakers patterns in distributed systems
Two trends toward Multi-core
Reactive Manifesto
Event Driven vs. Message Driven
Reactive Programming and Streams
Microliths to Microsystems
What do you have to get right before you start trying to deploy a distributed systems?
Working with ML / AI at Lightbend to understand tracing through distributed system
Saga Pattern

More on this:
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Jonas Bonér on the Actor Model, Akka, Reactive Programming, Microservices and Distributed Systems

In this podcast Ben Linders, an InfoQ editor in the Culture & Methods area, spoke to Lianping Chen of Paddy Power about their adoption of continuous delivery.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - An introduction to continuous delivery
 - It is possible and feasible to go faster while maintaining and improving the quality of the products being built
 - The benefits from adopting continuous delivery include reduced time from completing development to getting product into production and getting faster customer feedback
 - The way you elicit and represent requirements also needs to change when adopting continuous delivery
 - Implementing continuous delivery needs significant investment in time and money – don’t underestimate the costs involved and plan the adoption to deliver benefits early and get some quick wins

More on this:
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Lianping Chen on Implementing Continuous Delivery

Demand for designers is higher than ever. Great products — the outcome of thoughtful design — are a result of stellar user experience. As design becomes a higher priority for startups, we are seeing a fundamental shift in how designers work. In this episode of Greymatter, John Lilly of Greylock catches up with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field to talk about how he got started as a entrepreneur, the Figma product, and the shift they’re seeing in the design space.

Figma CEO Dylan Field on Collaboration and Design in the Workplace | Greymatter

In our podcast this week Shane Hastie speaks to Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering at Slack, about intentional culture and continuous delivery.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - Leadership is a craft that needs to be learned
 - Characteristics and common challenges of high-growth startups
 - Aspects of culture include how do we get things done, how do we treat each other, how do we make decisions, who has power and influence, what are the things that we value?
 - The importance of making values explicit and experiential
 - The importance of the small group of influencers in any organisation who spread the culture to others

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2mP3Qjj

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Michael Lopp on Designing Culture for Sustainable Growth

We talk about growth all the time in the context of startups. How they grow, how they attract users, how they engage users. In this episode of Greymatter, two of the top minds in growth, Greylock Partner Josh Elman and Greylock Growth Advisor Casey Winters, talk about scaling Grubhub and Pinterest, starting growth teams, how to think about SEO, and optimizing user onboarding. The podcast is packed with full-stack growth marketing strategy and tactics Casey has implemented in his career, and these lessons are widely applicable to any consumer startup scaling up.

Scaling Users, Products, and Growth Teams with Casey Winters | Greymatter

Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to John Willis, Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker and co-author of the "DevOps Handbook", on DevOps evolution, leadership and burnout.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - DevOps got watered down along the way, but its principles and practices will stay.
 - People can learn the technical side of DevOps with training but they need to follow up on case studies from organizations that went through similar journeys.
 - Still early days to be able to distill what are the good and bad DevOps leadership practices, but we at least know that blameless environments are much more productive.
 - We are missing a burnout survey in DevOps, number of people affected probably staggering high but no one knows for sure, so the problem gets underrated.
 - The new view on human error is that we need to look at the system that allowed people to make the mistakes in the first place.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2rLIPrG

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John Willis on DevOps Evolution, Leadership and Burnout

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Patrick Kua from ThoughtWorks on growing technical leadership and evolutionary architecture

Why listen to this podcast:

 - There is a significant gap in technical leadership capability in teams and across the industry as a whole
 - Your experience as a developer doesn’t prepare you for a tech lead roleRecognize that the skills and responsibilities are very different and find ways to build the new skills – training, mentoring and support
 - Software will continue to be changed so it is important to build it for changeability from the beginning
 - Many of the big decisions which are made at the beginning of a product’s life will change over time, build the ability to change into the core architectural design

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2vy4xl4

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Patrick Kua on Growing Technical Leadership and Evolutionary Architecture

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jez Humble about his Agile 2017 Keynote talk in which he refuted many of the common excuses why “continuous delivery won’t work here”.  He also gave a scathing response to the “Manifestbro” controversy which recently unfolded at Google.

Why listen to this podcast:

Key takeaways about DevOps:

 - There are many reasons cited for not adopting DevOps – the real reasons are cultural and architectural issues
 - It takes commitment and effort at every level to rearchitect not just the products but the organisation to support the new ways of working
 - Even if you are not deploying every day, the practices of DevOps deliver huge dividends around reducing development costs, improving quality and maintainability and driving shorter lead
 - It’s not about repeating what someone else has done, it’s the ability to make mistakes and learn from them which makes teams and organisations successful

Key takeaways on the gender diversity challenge:

 - In 2017 we should have come beyond the need to address these issues but the state of the industry means we must
 - There is extensive research that shows the differences are tiny between the genders, and this cannot explain the vast disparity in representation in the industry by women and people of colour
 - The harm done by perpetuating the myths around gender differences
 - We all have a duty to create an inclusive environment
 - Examine your organisation’s systems, policies and practices for the visible elements of discrimination and fix them – check salaries and career advancement by role and if there is a gender or race difference in the rates of pay or advancement then fix them
 - Introducing Inclusive Collaboration and calling for participation and having the conversations about the many aspects of diversity in the workplace today

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Jez Humble on Making Continuous Delivery Work and Responding to Discrimination in Tech

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Denise Jacobs about her keynote talk on Banishing your Inner Critic. 

Why listen to this podcast:

•	Imposter syndrome is a real thing and it has many manifestations
•	Getting into a flow state results in massive productivity increases and is highly rewarding
•	Creativity is a practice and needs to be exercised
•	Creativity Denial is rife in the tech industry – “I’m not creative”, whereas many technical skills require highly creative thinking  
•	Recognise that creativity is not just about the artistic field – it’s not about whether or not you are creative, it’s about how you are creative

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InfoQ - Podcast

Denise Jacobs on Banishing Your Inner Critic

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks, about their recent report on the need for Courageous Leadership and her forthcoming book on Evolutionary Architecture.

Why listen to this podcast:
- Courageous leadership enables organisations to solve enterprise-scale problems while still allowing empowered development teams to produce software in an agile fashion
- The importance of making the link between technology advances and what they could mean for a business organisation, rather than seeing them in isolation
- If your metric is how many experiments succeed then you will not take enough risks – turn this around and celebrate the learning from failed experiments
- The need to truly put the customer at the centre our focus, understand the kind of relationship we want with customers and how we want to interact with them
- Create an environment where people are recognised and valued for their varied perspectives and recognise that good ideas can come from many different places
- Evolutionary architecture is based on the idea that things are changing so rapidly now that you can’t predict what changes will be needed in the future
- Innovations around databases, architecture and continuous delivery enable evolutionary architecture to be a real thing today

ThoughtWorks' CTO Rebecca Parsons on Courageous Leadership and Evolutionary Architecture

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman and Mike Grifiths about the joint PMI & Agile Alliance initiative to produce the Agile Practice Guide.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - There is nothing in the PMBOK that says you have to use a waterfall project delivery model
 - If we want to influence the people who hold the hearts and minds of senior management, there is no better way than to collaborate with them
 - The guide reflects the State of the Practice when it was written
 - The prevalence of agile terms in projects, without actually using agile approaches – the veneer of agile without the substance
 - Defining agile as a mindset based on values and principles rather than any set of practices
 - There are many options for undertaking work; the key is to have an agile mindset about which practices are most appropriate in a particular context and be prepared to change if the chosen practices are not helpful

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Johanna Rothman and Mike Griffiths on the Agile Alliance/PMI Agile Practice Guide

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Lee Cunningham of VersionOne about the results from the State of Agile Survey

Why listen to this podcast:

•	Agile is not just something that developers do – it’s an enabler of business outcomes
•	The emergence of multi-modal organisations where there are multiple different approaches being used simultaneously which holds them back from progressing effectively
•	Some organisations are adopting a Taylorism approach to agile adoption – get experts to tell us what to do and control the teams to abide by those rules
•	The emergence of business value as an important measure, over productivity (although productivity is a necessary precondition for business value)
•	Buying an expensive tool doesn’t make your agile adoption successful, in the same way that buying an expensive treadmill doesn’t make you fit – both need to be used effectively to deliver any value

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Engineering Management

Mike Chang 4