Notes on leading engineering teams

Navy panel with a three-by-three grid of squares, three filled indigo

Write the incident review for the person with the budget

Blameless reviews are written for responders and read once. Add a second reader with a budget, price the exposure in hours and dollars, and put a real choice in front of them.

Andrei GasparEditor, Deploy Friday9 min read

Architecture

Control and complexity: tension in systems design

Fred Hebert: teams pick control or complexity as a worldview, usually without noticing, and that choice quietly sets their code review, SLOs, and incident response. A table to argue with.

ferd.ca ↗

Career growth

Middle management roles are also a trap

Will Larson: a long stint in middle management trains you for more middle management, not for the executive job. Do the tour, then leave before the feedback loop selects against you.

lethain.com ↗

Reliability

Minus Two Minutes

Tim Irving: a fix that lands before customers notice shows up in the incident metrics as nothing. Why we pay for heroic recovery and not the two-minute save, from the Key Bridge to Y2K.

read.zerosevzero.com ↗

Reliability

30 to 70 PRs a Day: How We Managed to Not Wreck Our Systems

Honeycomb doubled its PR rate with AI and incidents tripled. Its own accounting says the multiplier is not the story; the deploy and ownership practices are.

honeycomb.io ↗

Reliability

Without a program to support them, incident management processes wither

Brent Chapman's test for an incident process: name who owns it, then ask what happens when they leave. "Everybody owns it" means nobody does.

greatcircle.com ↗

Navy panel with a three-by-three grid of squares, some filled indigo

Org design

Roadmap decisions rather than dates

Will Larson: execution stopped being the bottleneck; unresolved decisions are. Plan the roadmap as an ordered list of decisions and keep the external dates conservative.

Andrei GasparEditor, Deploy Fridaylethain.com ↗

Notes on leading engineering teams

Write the incident review for the person with the budget

Articles

Control and complexity: tension in systems design

Middle management roles are also a trap

Minus Two Minutes

30 to 70 PRs a Day: How We Managed to Not Wreck Our Systems

Without a program to support them, incident management processes wither

Roadmap decisions rather than dates

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