How to leverage pull request templates to improve collaboration and reduce lead times.

Use PR templates to improve communication

Your company already has a definition of done, even if it's not writen down. Here is a template to keep everybody align on expected quality.

A Definition of Done to align everyone

Keeping current with industry and technology is a challenge for engineering leaders. Here are some of the principles and sources I follow to do that.

How I keep up with technology as an engineering leader

Performance reviews are typical in larger organisations. Reports get anxious about a bad review or a pay rise below their expectations. Managers feel the process is cumbersome, wasteful and are concerned they are not being fair with all team members. In this article, I go through 7 tips to make performance reviews painless and fair for everybody involved.

7 ways to make performance reviews painless and fair

As an Engineering leader, you are keen to reduce burnout risk and consider hiring a couple of contractors when the team needs to deliver a large project fast. But are you fully aware of the trade-offs?
This article covers the benefits and risks of working with engineering contractors as well as the measures you can put in place to maximise your chances of success!

Fully integrate contractors into your team

The vast majority of early-stage startups hire a team of specialists when they just need to build a web application. I think this is a mistake in 95% of cases. In this article I present the benefits of hiring specialists in most organisations.

In support of hiring generalists for most early-stage startups

PRs that stay open for too long can have a negative impact on team velocity, value delivered, stress levels and software quality. In this article I cover ways to make sure PRs do not stagnate while maintaining quality and velocity

The problem of long-lived pull requests

I wrote this article as part of my role as VP Engineering at Plot. I wanted to share it here as an example of what a technology strategy could look like. It was our best guess at the time and by no means perfect!

The Plot technology strategy

As an Engineering leader, you want to create a solid technology strategy to provide the context your team needs to make excellent decisions. But how should you go about it? This article goes over 4 steps to help you create it

4 steps to create a solid technology strategy

A solid technology strategy is a requirement for building a high-performing engineering organisation that consistently hits business goals. In this article I cover what happens when teams don't have one compared to teams that do.

The importance of solid technology strategy and principles

Since the original 1968 article, there has been a lot of debate around the figure of the 10x developer. We're talking about engineers who are an order of magnitude better than their peers by whatever measure.
These engineers exist, but not in the way most people describe them.

10x developers really exist

The Engineering team at Plot had to deliver a prototype of our technology product and lay the foundations for the future in under 3 months. Take a look at the technology choices we made to build high quality web applications in 2022.

Behind the scenes of Plot's Learning Design Platform

To err is human, and I certainly have made my share of mistakes in my career as an engineering leader. It is vital to learn from these mistakes. Here are five mistakes I have made in my career as an engineering leader.

5 Mistakes I have made as an engineering leader

Responding to an outage can be extremely stressful. Having a checklist of everything that needs to be done can help engineers in your team stay calm and handle incidents more effectively.

A playbook for calm incident response

Software incidents suck big time but are unavoidable in complex systems. A great incident review doc can help you and your team learn to do better next time. Here is a template to help you have great incident reviews.

A template for great incident reviews

Understanding the why is essential to the success of a project and the team's performance. A group of people who don't understand users or their problems cannot build a high-quality product. Here are a few practices Engineering Managers can put in place to help their teams understand their users better.

Help Engineers understand the Why

We are in the most heated tech job market in history. Many people forget a job interview goes both ways. You can avoid ending up in an awful team by asking some of these questions.

8 Questions to ask your potential future Engineering Manager during an interview

The story of how I got into Engineering management and started my leadership career.

How I got into Engineering management

Stepping into the engineering manager role can be tough. These five books gave me insights and helped me reflect in ways that eased my journey. Hope they can help you too!

5 books you should read as a new Engineering Manager

The famous Joel Test is a quick and fun way to evaluate an engineering organisation by answering 12 simple yes or no questions. The test is over 20 years old! So, I outline a new, updated test for the engineering organisations of today.

The David Test - An updated Joel Test for 2022

Video recording of the panel about remote work organised by Universtat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) I participated in.

Remote work panel at UOC (Spanish)

Guide on how to make meetings more inclusive in an era of remote work and zoom calls

6 tips to make remote meetings more inclusive

Hiring engineers fast can be hard but it is definitely possible. This blog post gives a few tips and techniques to make it happen without destroying your team.

Leadership