The Truth About Git Metrics Tools

The Truth About Git Metrics Tools January 24, 2023

There’ve recently been a couple of interesting Twitter discussions about engineering metrics tools, namely whether people actually use them and the questionable metrics that they expose.

There are at least a couple dozen different vendors out there that currently provide this type of a solution. These products primarily provide analytics on top of tools like GitHub and Jira, and some support additional data sources.

Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead

An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping launch throughput—apparently a matter of vital importance for the success of the company.

Organizational Boundary Problems: Too Many Cooks or Not Enough Kitchens?

Inside Noma, an open kitchen which supports exceptional teamwork. Image credit: City Foodsters, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re lucky, you’ve worked in a job with respectful people who share information openly and habitually bring different perspectives together for big decisions (if you haven’t, yes these do exist!). I’ve been a part of several open work cultures, and it’s been good for me. Working where people are actively pulling towards transparency, inclusivity, and empowerment, on problems that matter, is hugely satisfying.

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2211.03622v2 (cs)

[Submitted on 7 Nov 2022 (v1), last revised 16 Dec 2022 (this version, v2)]

Authors:, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, Dan Boneh

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Abstract: We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with

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The maze is in the mouse. What ails Google. And how it can turn… | by Praveen Seshadri | Feb, 2023 | Medium

I joined Google just before the pandemic when the company I had co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired by Google Cloud. The acquiring team and executives welcomed us and treated us well. We joined with great enthusiasm and commitment to integrate AppSheet into Google and make it a success. Yet, now at the expiry of my three year mandatory retention period, I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function.

Fixing “Too Much WIP”

“too much WIP” means too many things being worked on at the same time

WIP refers to “work-in-process”, that is how many things are being processed or worked on at the same time.

“Too much WIP” refers to having too many tasks / Stories / Initiatives / Bets being worked on at the same time. This applies at the individual, team, department, and company-level.

“too much WIP” is a problem because it makes things take longer

Calendar Triage for Startup Leaders

Many engineering leaders share a common problem: too many things to do, and not enough time to do them all. In my coaching practice I often work with my clients to optimize their calendars, and one of my primary tools for this process is a modified Eisenhower Matrix.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

The Eisenhower Matrix

At some point in their career, most of my clients have encountered a 2 by 2 matrix, divided into Important / Not Important on one Axis, and Urgent / Not Urgent on the other. However, most of them haven’t heard its name: An Eisenhower Matrix. The name originates from a quote attributed to the former US President:

Jade Rubick – Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups

Today, I would like to share a management practice we developed at New Relic. It was one of the best things we did as an engineering organization. The practice is called “Mini-Ms”. I believe it’s as important a practice for managers as code reviews are for engineers.

This post is first of a series:

1. In this post, we look at how Mini-Ms work and what they are.
2. Next, we learn how to implement Mini-Ms.
3. Finally, we share a history of Mini-Ms, including where the name came from.

What is a Mini-M?

A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. In each session, managers share challenges they face. The other participants offer support and help problem-solve.

DevEx Principles: Minimize Switching Contexts

Recently someone asked me what my principles are for DevEx. Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I’ve learned a lot about what developers need to succeed. Still, I’ve never documented the principles I use daily to build developer tools, so I’ve decided to write it all down.

1. Interruptions matter even when it’s your tools that are doing it.
2. Respect the craft. The bar is higher because you’re building products for people who build products.
3. Automate anything that can be automated: Automation is king. Any task that can be run in the background should.
4. Optimize for TTC (time to code): Just as artists need to see paint on canvas in order to keep creating, developers need to see code running in order to test, get feedback, and ship.
5. Be dependable: Be mindful of breaking changes. People’s services depend on your services.
6. Don’t bury the lede: Show me what is possible and why it matters. Don’t hide pricing, don’t use convoluted marketing language, and don’t hide the documentation.

I’ll talk about each principle in detail over the next five posts. Minimizing switching contexts is the first and perhaps the most important, and I consider all of them when designing and building any new developer-focused product.

My Role as a Founder CTO: Year Five

It’s hard to believe that five years have already gone by since RevenueCat’s inception. In a matter of weeks, RevenueCat will become the company where I have worked the longest in my career. As Jason Lemkin says, it’s important to continuously reinvent the company and oneself every five years. It’s required to carry on and stay relevant the following five.

I had no doubts my role was going to evolve again. It has every single year, leading me to start this series of posts. But the remarkable part this year has been the internal transformation of RevenueCat. As we enter 2023, the company is more mature than ever before, with well-established processes, cross-functional teams, and leaders in key areas. The company has become a well-oiled machine, allowing us to deliver quality software at a faster pace. However, reaching this point was not without its challenges and it took a lot of hard work to get here.

A Framework for Prioritizing Tech Debt

The Importance of Leverage

Having spent over a decade building tech startups, I’ve come across my fair share of tech debt: The gnarly Ember.js code no one wants to touch, the bespoke cloud infrastructure maintained entirely by hand, or the solitary Elixir service left behind by a long-gone former teammate.

While these may be painful today, at one point in the past they were likely important accelerants that pushed the product forward in a meaningful way. In fact, tech debt is arguably a necessary evil–if a growing company isn’t taking on some measure of leverage, then it’s likely not shipping as fast as it should be. However as a company begins to see traction, there will come an inflection point where it becomes important to start prioritizing tech debt.1

Playing Long Games: Focus on Companies With Moats and Relevant Products

3 February 2023 | by Todd Wenning, CFA

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The longest nine-inning Major League Baseball game took four hours and forty-five minutes to complete; the shortest took just fifty-one minutes. Suffice it to say the concession stands had a much better day for the former than the latter.

Baseball analogies are used too often in investing, but the concept of innings is a worthy one. Unlike most sports, where games have a time limit, baseball is measured in innings rather than time.

The Latest Synthetic Base Layers Have Surpassed the Performance of Merino Wool

I’ve stopped wearing merino base layers. The change wasn’t deliberate, sudden, or driven by a deep concern for the wellbeing of rare sheep. Instead, it happened naturally over time, because the latest generation of synthetic next-to-skins genuinely offers superior performance.

A unique mix of performance attributes have always made wool the go-to long underwear. It remains warm when wet, resists odor, actively wicks moisture away from your skin, and helps regulate temperature, keeping you warm when you’re resting and cool when you’re moving.

Too Busy

Too Busy

For the last handful of years I’ve been too busy to do a lot of things. Too

busy to launch new products on my free time, too busy to go on trips for fun,

and too busy to spend time with family and friends.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few years working on company projects,

trying to leave a lasting impression with my work. While this has been

My Ambient Information Display

I like to be immersed in useful information, and often dreamed of ways to have it literally floating above me so that I could glance up and see something new and interesting.

A few years ago I mounted a 43″ Fire TV above my desk, tie-wrapped a Raspberry Pi to the back of it, and used MagicMirror to create the display of my dreams. I have spent several years improving my display and am finally ready to tell you all about it!

Developer Relations, where do you start? – Prashant Sridharan

I spoke with someone recently who didn’t know where to start with their first hire in Developer Relations. As folks who know me appreciate, I think of the Developer Relations organization as the following distinct functional areas:

• Developer Advocates: they’re the spine of your Developer Relations program. They’re technical experts, content machines, top-gun spokespeople, and the primary community interface. As I always say, “Trust and integrity are your primary currency, not your products or services.” Developer Advocates ooze trust and integrity, always speaking honestly and on behalf of (advocating for) the developer community.
• Developer Product Marketing: the ringleaders of the circus. They coordinate consistent positioning and messaging, launches, customer feedback and discovery, and imbue the rest of the organization with mission and purpose.
• Developer Growth: campaigns, SEO, and digital marketing.
• Developer Marketing: events, social media, comms, and content program management.
• Developer Education: documentation, training, and (if you’re big enough) certification.

In later posts, I’ll dive into each of these functional areas and ways for you to improve each.

Management Debt

Teams naturally start to incur management debt as they grow and become more complex, just as codebases incur tech debt. The combined weight of past decisions creates a web of precedents and exceptions that can cause problems of varying size over time.

For a concrete example of management debt, consider a team that’s never had performance reviews. They’ve saved time by skipping reviews, but have taken on significant management debt by not setting expectations or addressing over/under performance. When they kick off performance reviews they’ll have to pay down this debt with overdue promotions or performance management.

How to handle a reorganization as an engineering manager | LeadDev

We’ve all been through reorgs before. When you’re an individual contributor, they tend to be mysterious, often frustrating management exercises. Your boss changes suddenly, or your team is dissolved into other teams, or you’re moved into an entirely new organization and even though your job is the same, everything feels different.

Many of us go into management having had negative reorg experiences, and the first time we find ourselves on the other side of the process, it can be jarring. When you find yourself part of the group that’s in the know about a pending reorg, what should you do?

The Engineering Manager’s Tools

What is in a manager’s toolbox?

I’ve been writing about how to use systems thinking in software engineering management. I want to continue addressing a practical point: how to make change happen as an Engineering Manager (EM).

One of the realities of being an EM is that you constantly work on improving your team’s situation. For example, you can try to make your team more effective, help a team member grow, or improve your organization. Ultimately, being a change agent is a large part of the role.

Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success.

But a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.

Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.

Framing → Shaping

Over the last few months I’ve worked with teams to help them adapt Shape Up to their specific context. Talking to a wider variety of teams has been eye-opening. It’s helped me discover many hidden factors that were present at Basecamp when I first wrote the book. This is now leading to a whole new iteration of the process and steps that I’m teaching teams to improve their product development.

A Mental Model for Addressing Burnout

It’s not you.

A mental model for addressing burnout

Last week I was on a panel addressing the topic of burnout. It’s a topic that pops up with some frequency, yet the misconception that burnout is a personal problem seems to persist.

Burnout isn’t something you can solve by doing breathing exercises or starting a bullet-journal. Burnout is a systemic issue which the WHO now classifies as an organizational phenomenon, and which therefore requires systemic change to address.

How to Lead Strategically Every Day

Strategic leadership can often sound abstract and hard to put into words. Not only that, the majority of the CTOs, VPs and engineering leaders I work with are so busy running from meeting to meeting, handling team issues or trying to scale, that they have zero time to work on the most important aspect of their job: strategy.

The higher your leadership position, the more strategic your role becomes, and in turn the greater the impact your decisions will have on the business as a whole. The ability of a leader to always see the big picture, identify trends and patterns, and consider a range of perspectives is critical to strategic leadership.

The Pros and Cons of Working Directly for the CEO

Pros of working directly for CEO:

– Turbocharges learnings
– Accelerated decisions + impact
– Lifetime relationship
– More rewarding

Cons of working directly for CEO:

– Feedback can be too direct
– Appreciations only for results
– Not available enough
– You’ll need to grow

— Jason ✨BeKind✨ Lemkin ⚫️ (@jasonlk) August 2, 2020

I remember the first time I worked directly for a CEO. I’d reported to leaders before, and a VP before, but never the CEO.

My Take on Why Goal Cascades Are Harmful and What to Do Instead

If collective goals matter, you need some way of creating coherence.

“The very business of getting an organisation made up of individuals, no matter how disciplined, to pursue a collective goal produces friction just as surely as applying the brakes of a car.”

Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action

As long as it’s more than one person AND it’s important that we achieve some collective goal THEN we need some way of facilitating coherent action across an organisation. Without coherence, you’ll see a lot of duplicate, competing, or missing efforts.

What a Healthy Team Looks Like

The concept of “healthy teams” is something I stole from the Engineering Org at Pluralsight before the Vista acquisition. Most people attribute healthy teams to buzzwords like “collaboration” or “psychological safety.” The people who had been a part of healthy teams know what it feels like, but they can’t distill it into a recipe. There is no recipe for culture.

I’ve told this story before but I was initially a team of 1 on the Search team, and in the next 3 years, we grew into a data platform with 5 engineering mobs. Those of us who have left often refer to the Discovery team as “THAT team.” I was very proud of the products that we built together, but I am far more proud of our culture, the invisible thread that connected us beyond our tenure at Pluralsight.

Guiding Principle: Cross-Pollination Over Imposed Standards

Guiding principle in effective product development culture.

There are many ways to say it: de facto over de jure standards, natural over imposed consistency, cross-pollination over imposed standards. They are all describing the same way to answer the question: how should standard ways of doing something be spread more broadly?

So why might a standard be valuable enough to bother trying to spread?

Standards are useful to simplify learning and address variation of performance

Standards are useful to avoid everyone having to learn a new way of doing things every time they interact with a new team.