Colin Contreary

Stop being so arrogant. Stop expecting Software Engineers to just be able to do stuff the right way. They haven't formatted a tech spec the right way? They didn't include all the stakeholders in an update email? They haven't made a concise delivery plan? Use it as an opportunity to coach them and spend some quality time with them enabling them with the knowledge of how to do it in the future. If you are just giving feedback you are a manager. If you are giving feedback and using it as a coaching opportunity you are a leader. If you are the former, get over yourself. I promise you, your standards are only so high because you have a title, not because you are actually any good at your job.

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libyear.com is interesting for determining how out of date your dependencies are (gem install libyear-bundler && libyear-bundler). Flipper Cloud: 58.7 Box Out: 89.9 Speaker Deck: 240.3 What's your rails apps libyear score? Judgement free zone, I'm just curious.

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I love a good "drama", so when the guest post "In Defense of Feature Team Product Managers" by Ben Erez hit Lenny's Newsletter, I brought out my popcorns and was ready to dive in. When Marty Cagan released his article "Product Management Theater" in January, it definitely caused a stir in the product community, leading to Lenny's podcast with Marty on this topic. Marty has strong opinions on what makes a “real” PM. Having read Marty's books since I was a PM newbie, his work has been my guiding light, though it sometimes made me question if I fit his definition of a true PM. Ben Erez’s recent post was a breath of fresh air, counter to the popular narrative. He highlighted the value of feature teams, especially for CEOs with a clear product vision, and emphasized the crucial roles PMs play, whether on feature or empowered teams. I appreciate Lenny for bringing these #diverse perspectives to light. It’s easy to be influenced by thought leaders, but hearing different viewpoints helps us form our own opinions and decide what’s best for our unique circumstances. Hats off to Lenny for creating such an #inclusive space! - In defense of feature team product managers by Ben Erez: https://lnkd.in/gaGkSn6f - Product Management Theater by Marty Cagan: https://lnkd.in/gD36X2zU - Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky: https://lnkd.in/gWGpjX7g #productmanagement #diversity

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If you want to sell me docs tooling: 1. It's a bad look to go 100% negative. 2. If you must go negative, you need to be right. Given my current docs as code setup: - Has no problem scaling (what does this even mean? Do they imagine there's a limit on GitHub contributors? Or on the number of files a static site generator can handle?). - Has content reuse. - Includes a fully automated publishing process that I almost never have to think about. I now have a lower opinion of a popular docs tool than I did before this email hit my inbox.

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When I transitioned from an engineer to a CTO almost 9 years ago I had no idea how big of a change that was going to be. Here are 5 biggest lessons I had to learn (the hard way): 1 | Delegate or die You can't do everything yourself because you won't have time. Literally. For your own sake try to keep your boundaries and say "no" to most of the things. Delegate things others can do better than you or have time to do. If you don't you will burn out. I did. Twice. 2 | Let go of your IC dreams When the company is small you will most likely have to code. But soon enough you will be pulled into a bunch of sales/investor/customer/management meetings. This will most likely frustrate you. You have a deadline and need to finish that feature you started. Soon enough you will become a bottleneck and will be faced with a choice: Do you want to build software or people and business? CTO is a business title and you have to be honest with yourself. Are you ready to let go of your coding ambitions? 3 | I am the boss? I am the boss! I AM THE BOSS!! It's scary when you realize that people depend on you. They expect you to make tough choices, have uncomfortable conversations and help them. It's your organization and how you set it up and run is totally up to you. The realization that you can do exactly as you want is both liberating and scary. You need to find someone to discuss things with. It can be your colleague, friend, partner or even better, a mentor. 4 | Don't think. Try You will constantly be faced with unknown, new and hard decisions, often with limited information. Instead of spending time thinking, decide on something and do an experiment. Don't think too long. Try. Do a controlled experiment. Applies to both tech and people. 5 | Work myself out "I don't know how to do it" doesn't fly well in startups. You are expected to learn, to figure things out, and fast too. But you also need to learn how to work yourself out of your current job. Either promote internally or hire externally to replace a part of you. This was one of the hardest things because it always feels like I let go of control. But most of the times it worked out great. It's not until you do that you realize how much stress and energy you save. I always asked myself later why I hadn't thought of it and done it much sooner. These were the big five lessons. Thank you for reading. If you like my what you just read feel free to follow me for more content like this 🙂 --- I am Ilia and help companies create a solid tech foundation 

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How did InvisionApp with a $1.9 billion valuation fail so badly? The short answer: - Lack of product focus - Marketing over innovation - Feature release stagnation - Declining customer trust - Missing innovation in the design space They could have easily prevented all of this! They had the talent. They had the money. They had the insight in the design industry. I covered this all in yesterday's newsletter issue. You can read it here: https://lnkd.in/dPU_kYF5

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Ed Anuff, the Chief Product Office of DataStax, joined me to talk about Cassandra and DataStax's role within the emerging LLM stack. We talked about: 👉 Distributed databases 👉 Vector indices 👉 RAG 👉 Building AI-powered applications Ed's a super smart guy, we barely scratched the surface here. Please enjoy!

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Hiring is generally broken, and the way I prefer to do it when hiring software engineers historically over the last few years, is something I think people can learn from, so here's my system: 1. Identify what the team is missing and put together a description of what the team needs to fill the role. 2. Take the job description, identify the character attributes that are most relevant for the position, and rank them in terms of importance. (See below for the character attributes I use and what they mean.) 3. Write out questions appropriate for the role in different voices, and practice them on video for yourself before any day's meetings so you can flow naturally. 4. Collect information in notes during the call and map them to the attributes. Character Attributes This is not a perfect list, but it works for me, and I've identified these items in people of all races, genders, etc., who have had success in life. Not all of them tick all the boxes, but almost all of them tick a good number of them. - Drive: Unrelenting need for achievement and self-improvement - Resiliency: Perseverance in the face of challenges and bounce back from setbacks - Adaptability: Learn new things, innovate, try new methods, ability to adjust according to the situation - Humility: Self-confidence in their abilities while understanding there's always room to improve and that others' knowledge & expertise are valuable - Integrity: An adherence not only to what is legal, but also what is right - Effective Intelligence: Apply their own knowledge to real-world scenarios - Team Ability: The ability to function as part of a team placing its success above their own ego - Curiosity: The desire to explore the unknown and question the status quo in the pursuit of finding better and more efficient solutions - Emotional Strength: Positive attitude, empathy, control over their own emotions These are the traits I've found in successful people across disciplines, including in software, which is my area of focus. They are no guarantee of success, just an indicator that the person could succeed. Optimizing for success potential and technical ability is often a great way to make better hiring decisions. But remember, there are no silver bullets.

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Having a ton of fun writing an ORM for V2 of Case Kit. Typescript has such an incredible type system. I have autocompletion for column names, the ability to include relations, relations of relations, etc etc etc... all returning properly typed data (no classes in sight). It's been really satisfying seeing it coming together, and it's been great getting my hands dirty with some (relatively) complex generics. And to head off the obvious question… why aren’t I just using Prisma? Well there’s a couple of things I’m doing differently that I think are marginally better: there’s no code generation involved here, it’s just types (inspired by Drizzle); there’s no Rust binary you need to deploy, and it hews much closer to Postgres behaviour and syntax (the aim here is not to abstract away which database you’re using). But the real blocker to me using Prisma was that its extensions don’t support modifying queries of nested relations - a hard requirement for me due to the way I have multitenancy and soft deletes set up. It’s not shown in the video but the Case Kit ORM lets you write simple middleware that will be applied to every level of a nested query. Perfect for setting timestamps or adding clauses on tenant id or things like that.

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Advice for solo devs in their first team role: Copy this TL;DR onto a post it for the monitor. Explanation below. Minimize WIP PRs before coding Learn from the tenured Identify individual strengths Curiosity before feedback The problem is the enemy Minimize WIP. You should have a max of 3 tasks concurrently, ideally 1 or 2 (to account for being blocked on occasion). PRs before coding. First thing every day should be unlocking any PRs that others have. PRs are going to be a major source of learning now that you're on a team. Learn from the tenured. There are sometimes legit reasons that things are built differently than you would have. They often have to do with constraints you don't know about, legacy code, security, compliance, etc. Identify strengths. Each person has a very different blend of how they deliver value. Learn what that is for your coworkers and yourself. Leverage that accordingly. Curiosity over feedback. Feedback in the form of a question is far better when you're learning the codebase & learning how to work on a team. Don't say "this will never be secure", instead say "how does this meet our security requirements? It's not clear to me." The problem is the enemy (not your coworkers or their ideas). Avoid the gravitational pull of win-lose conversations. Make the problem the enemy e.g. "How might we" is a good phrase to practice. What would you add? #swe #teamwork #solodevtips

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Agree that MS/GH have moved extremely quickly to incorporate LLMs into their products -- but I think that's the key word, incorporate. This isn't disruption in the traditional sense. Copilot Workspace largely does things that GH already did in some form -- you could make plans in GH Issues, you could run apps or pieces of apps in GH Codespaces, etc -- but uses LLMs to enforce hygiene and walk devs through the ideal version of the process they were already more or less doing. Combining GH's existing tools with a super smart English speaking robot is indeed a recipe for magic. That's more or less what MS has done with Copilot too -- this is a case where the corporate mandate to "figure out how to use AI in your product" actually kind of worked, because it wasn't asking anybody to really rethink and reimagine their product or workflow. The speed at which they've done all this does show that startups should focus on problems or approaches that the big guys can't or won't -- if there's one weakness to GH Copilot, it's that they can't imagine a world where the developer isn't fully in control, both because that's GH's core ethos (developers are in control) and because they sell Copilot by the seat.

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Unlock the secrets to next-level software engineering with these system design processes... In the realm of software engineering, two pivotal stages lay the groundwork for any project: high-level design (HLD) and low-level design (LLD). Despite their frequent interchangeability, grasping their nuances is vital for ensuring project to be successful. HLD (High-Level Design): - Think of it as the big picture. It provides a broad overview of the entire system architecture. - An HLD focuses on what the system will do, not how it will do it. - It outlines the system's major components, their functionalities, and how they interact at a high level. Key elements: - Functional requirements of the system. - Overall system architecture (diagrams helpful). - High-level decisions like database selection, communication protocols. LLD (Low-Level Design): - Dives deep into the specifics of each component defined in the HLD. - It focuses on the how of the system, providing a blueprint for implementation. - LLD details algorithms, data structures, APIs, and specific technologies used within each component. Key elements: - Detailed design of each module/component. - Algorithms and data structures used. - Interface definitions between modules. - Specific technologies and libraries chosen for development. If you liked this post. 🔔 Follow: Darpan Pathak ♻ Repost to help others find it. 💾 Save it for future reference. #SystemDesign #Technology #Programming 

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Thank you to Jason Lengstorf for talking with me at CityJS Conferences about reducing stress for #softwareengineers, and sharing practical tips for advancing a coding career. + Get a sneak peek at "Web Lunch", Jason's latest series. Link down below!👇

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🌶️ Mandatory Config reaction post: Surprised they’re leaning more into asset generation, work approval statuses, and presentation tooling versus full workflow integration across the dev lifecycle. They’re choosing to go after Zeplin and gSlides because it’s easier, but Flutterflow can/will quickly close the gap for the next generation of emerging orgs. Figma will become the entrenched Axure big-team-bloat waterfall design tool? Easier for Flutterflow to build a better design interface than Figma to do the opposite and move to delivering code in production.

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Will Devin AI replace developers? 😱 Maybe 🤷🏻‍♂️ To me personally, Devin is a development tool and not a replacement...YET 🌚 I am not denying that Devin can code really well if all the claims are accurate. Eventually, it may replace developers. But developers don’t code just to code. We build products ✅ We build solutions ✅ And these happen to be made of code. Can companies ditch all developers today and expect products to still get built and maintained to the same standard as an enterprise-level solution? Nope 🙅🏻‍♂️ The quality of a product refers to how well it solves user problems. And those gaps between code, user, and solution? That’s where good developers provide values 👨🏻‍💻✨

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Jr. Devs, Looking at my TODO list for work this morning I found myself paralyzed. There was a lot to get done and many different priorities that I could place on each item based on availability, needs of clients, resources, etc. So… I just ordered them alphabetically and started working on them. Perfect? No. Moving forward? Yes! I know the amount of learning you face can be daunting. It’s often hard to know where to start or where to go next. Sometimes you just need to DO. Especially right now when getting hired may be somewhat out of the question for many of you due to the current market, analyzing the “best way” may keep you from moving forward at all. Find something that interests you and just start doing it. You never know what doors or new ideas or directions it might open up. #juniordeveloper #mentoring #do

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🔥The countdown begins! A groundbreaking new feature is coming, thanks to the incredible efforts of our CTO Renan Ugalde and our team. This release will set a new standard in software testing. Follow us to stay tuned!🚀✨ #SoftwareTesting #Innovation #Muuktest

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