Product Management at Gatsby

Our goal with product management at Gatsby is to create an ongoing and iterative product discovery and development process that allows us to ship customer value quickly and with confidence in our product–market fit. There are a lot of ways to break down product development and management.

The first is “waterfall” development where information is generated at the “top” of the company and then slowly (or quickly) trickles down to the rest of the organization for execution.

How Remote Work Impacts Employees With Disabilities

Jun 27, 2019

Remote work does more than save money.

Table of Contents

1. How commuting impedes employees with disabilities
2. How remote jobs helps people with disabilities work
3. Remote work makes tech more accessible

“Just getting off of a bus, I stepped out into a pothole because I wasn’t able to navigate the whole walking thing well, and I ended up breaking my ankle.”

Working the Weekly 1:1

A better approach for the most important meeting of the week

There are a lot of work “rituals” that suck so badly you want to hunt down and interrogate who ever invented them. The dreaded weekly status email is one of them. The weekly 1:1 between a boss and a direct report can be another. What should be a chance to get on the same page with the person critical to your success is often awkward, overly chummy or even skipped.

Gatsby Core Philosophy

Gatsby’s core philosophy can be divided into three parts.

First, our vision. Our vision is to construct higher-level web building blocks, and create a cohesive content mesh system, in order to make building websites fun and build a better web.

Second, our tooling philosophy. In order to make website building fun, Gatsby’s tooling must embody certain qualities. These include:

• bundling the modern JavaScript ecosystem
• progressive disclosure of complexity

Third, our community philosophy. We can’t do this alone, so we’re striving to build the most inclusive community on the web. For that reason, we work in the open. At all times, we believe, and strive to communicate, that you belong here.

SameSite cookies explained | web.dev

Secure your site by learning how to explicitly mark your cross-site cookies.

May 7, 2019

Rowan Merewood

• GitHub
• Glitch

Cookies are one of the methods available for adding persistent state to web

sites. Each cookie is a key=value pair along with a number of attributes that

control when and where that cookie is used. You’ve probably already used these

attributes to set things like expiry dates or indicating the cookie should only

Why a good boss likes it when people complain

I know some managers say “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” but personally I don’t subscribe to it.

I love when people complain to me. Of course, complaining is a national past time for the British, and we don’t just limit ourselves to complaining about the weather, or the poor availability of good tea when traveling. Brexit has provided some strong fodder for complaining (where do we begin?) but really your average British can complain about anything.

‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’

Arthur Holland Michel | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,946 words)

Drones have come to define the United States’ forever war, the so-called war on terror. The expansion of drone systems developed by the military into new territories — including the continental United States — embodies this era’s hyper-paranoid ethos: new threats are ever imminent, conflict is always without resolution. At the same time, non-militarized drones have entered civilian life in a number of ways, from breathtaking cinematography to flight control at Heathrow airport. There are many avid documenters of this new technology, but no one seems to understand its many facets quite like Arthur Holland Michel, founder and co-director of the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone, which catalogs the growing use of drones around the world. Now, Holland Michel has written Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, a book of startling revelations about drone surveillance in the United States.

Review: Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch.

By Geoffrey A. Fowler | The Washington Post Columnist

You open your browser to look at the web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the web.

Journey to the Content Mesh Conclusion: Creating Compelling Content Experiences

This is Part 5, the conclusion of a series. Part 1 is The Journey to a Content Mesh*; Part 2 is* Unbundling of the CMS*; Part 3 is* The Rise of Modern Web Development; Part 4 is Why Mobile Performance is Crucial.

In the last three sections, we’ve described the different facets of how to create modern, compelling content experiences. We’ve covered trends in content management, web development, and website performance.

Journey to the Content Mesh Part 4: Why Mobile Performance Is Crucial

This is Part 4 of a series. Part 1 is The Journey to a Content Mesh*; Part 2 is* Unbundling of the CMS*; Part 3 is* The Rise of Modern Web Development.

Mobile traffic now makes up over half of all site visits, and more than half of mobile site visits are abandoned if a page takes over 3 seconds to load.

What does a VP of Engineering do? – Dan DeMeyere – Medium

Photo by Todd Diemer

Dan DeMeyere Mar 22, 2018

When people ask me what a VP of Engineering does, I like to reference the analogy Mark Suster used in a blog post clarifying the difference between a CTO and VPE:

VP’s of Engineering are essential to making sure the trains run on time.

Having been in this role for a while now, I’d expand that by saying:

7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer

Next year, I’ll be entering my 10th year of being formally employed to write code.

Ten years! And besides actual employment, for nearly 2⁄3 of my life, I’ve been

building things on the web. I can barely remember a time in my life where I

didn’t know HTML, which is kind of weird when you think about it. Some kids

learn to play an instrument or dance ballet, but instead I was creating

Rugged Software

The Rugged Manifesto

I am rugged and, more importantly, my code is rugged.

I recognize that software has become a foundation of our modern world.

I recognize the awesome responsibility that comes with this foundational role.

I recognize that my code will be used in ways I cannot anticipate, in ways it was not designed, and for longer than it was ever intended.

I recognize that my code will be attacked by talented and persistent adversaries who threaten our physical, economic, and national security.

I recognize these things – and I choose to be rugged.

I am rugged because I refuse to be a source of vulnerability or weakness.

I am rugged because I assure my code will support its mission.

I am rugged because my code can face these challenges and persist in spite of them.

I am rugged, not because it is easy, but because it is necessary and I am up for the challenge.

(more…)

Conscious Leadership

January 29, 2019

Conscious Leadership

Conscious Leadership is about being more interested in learning than being right. When our egos make us afraid to be wrong, that fear leads us to defend our ideas at all costs, and to work too hard to convince others that we are right—often with anger.

Conscious Leadership is about recognizing when these emotions (fear, anger, sadness) have gripped our thought processes, releasing these emotions, and shifting back to a state of curiosity where we are receptive to all ideas and creativity, even if they seem to contradict our own.

Becoming a bad-ass engineering leader: 5 tried and true lessons from a woman of color – Abstract

Becoming a bad-ass engineering leader: 5 tried and true lessons from a woman of color

Our VP of Engineering, Rukmini Reddy, shares the pivotal events that helped shape her path and underpin her leadership philosophy.

Company

Yes, I said bad-ass. I went from being just another Indian school girl being taught in a convent, to being a VP of Engineering for three incredible companies in Silicon Valley. While having twin boys who are now 5. So, yeah. I lean into my badassery, because I have worked very hard for it.

Into the Personal-Website-Verse · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and noise.

Your Unfriendly Neighborhood

Craving for attention and engagement, our timelines have changed. Algorithms now prioritize content from people with a huge following and everything that is loud and outrageous. It’s all about what the masses and the bots “want”, what they will like, share, and click. This strategy might be driving sales of ads because traditional online marketers are obsessed with quantity and it is – besides selling user data – the only answer they found for venture capital constantly demanding a bang for the buck. Yet it leads to an experience that is so often just more of the same and at the same time much less predictable, less organic, and less adjustable to your own preferences. As Craig Mod writes, “social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do.”

Friday wins and a case study in ritual design

Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture.

Yet very few of us think much about ritual design.

A standard piece of software development practice that many teams let lapse, or merely let lapse into being sub-optimal is “Friday wins”, sometimes called sprint demos or sprint reviews. But you can take what can be a flaccid and repetitive meeting and make it a valuable ritual by grounding it in values.

Four Magic Numbers for Measuring Software Delivery

David Lush Mar 26

If you’ve read my previous post around ONZO’s engineering manifesto you will get a sense that we are proud of both our team culture and the way we deliver software. Late last year we started having conversations around “how do we elevate what we do to the next level as the team grows?”. Namely increasing our speed to market with new products while keeping a good grip on quality. We were using velocity as a planning tool, tracking quality through escaped bugs, had a handle on platform SLOs and working around a well formed roadmap. It felt like we were at risk of stagnating though.

Introducing Example Mapping

Before you pull a user story into development, it’s crucial to have a conversation to clarify and confirm the acceptance criteria.

Some people do this during their backlog refinement or planning poker sessions. Other teams have a specific three amigos meeting, specification workshop or discovery workshop.

Whatever you call this conversation, many teams find it hard; it’s unstructured, it takes too long and gets boring. The result is they don’t do it regularly or consistently, or maybe they just give up on it entirely.

Taste For Makers

February 2002

“…Copernicus’

aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential

motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system….”

– Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution

“All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed

fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked

beautiful would fly the same way.”

– Ben Rich, Skunk Works

“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this

Dear map people – macwright.org

Dear map people,

Routing is the most powerful tool we have to reduce the environmental impact of driving, make cities quieter, safer, and more livable, and fight congestion. And you are blowing it.

This might be because HERE, the number two provider of map technologies, was bought by a bunch of car companies. Or because Google is headquartered in the suburbs. Or that the financial world is fixated on opening the pandora’s box of self-driving cars.

Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management.

“Time management” is not a solution — it’s actually part of the problem.

Erik Winkowski

A few years ago during a break in a leadership class I was teaching, a manager named Michael walked up looking unsettled. His boss had told him he needed to be more productive, so he had spent a few hours analyzing how he spent his time. He had already cut his nonessential meetings. He couldn’t find any tasks to drop from his calendar. He didn’t see an obvious way to do them more efficiently.

bliki: TechnicalDebt

Martin Fowler

Software systems are prone to the build up of cruft – deficiencies in

internal quality that make it harder than it would ideally be to modify and

extend the system further. Technical Debt is a metaphor, coined by Ward

Cunningham, that frames how to think about dealing with this cruft, thinking

of it like a financial debt. The extra effort that it takes to add new

How San Francisco broke America’s heart

(Ric Carrasquillo/for The Washington Post)

SAN FRANCISCO — A Tuesday afternoon in the Mission District of America’s tech wonderland.

Michael Feno stands outside Lucca Ravioli, his beloved pasta emporium on Valencia, a vestige of old San Francisco, puffing on a cigar while posing for pictures, his customers in tears.

Living in this city’s radically shifting landscape, veterinarian Gina Henriksen found comfort by telling herself, “Thank God, Lucca is still here. If Lucca goes, I’m going to have to leave San Francisco. What do we have left?”

Perspective | I was chief of disguise at CIA. ‘The Americans’ got a lot right.

Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as spies in disguise in “The Americans.” (Eric Liebowitz/FX)

After 27 years in the CIA working on operational assignments around the world, I am somewhat numbed to the fictional espionage that engulfs us — the books and movies and TV shows that always get it wrong. That’s why I have largely shunned the genre, barely noting the reviews of the latest creations that celebrate the life of an intelligence officer. “Homeland”? No. The Bourne movies? No. “Alias”? God, no! It’s the main reason I work as an adviser and speaker at the Spy Museum in Washington: to present an informed but still entertaining picture of the work of a spy.

Stripe CTO David Singleton on what makes an effective developer team

One of the most common and cardinal mistakes startups often make when building a product is not conducting adequate market research.

There many instances of companies rolling out product or software updates that they believe to be innovative or competent, only to be met with indifference or displeasure by the public or users because they find the product unintuitive, cumbersome or simply of little utility — if at all.

Coffee Shops, Office Space, and… the Future of Remote Work

Natalie Sandman May 20

As a VC at Shasta Ventures, I look into technologies related to the “future of work” — automation/machine intelligence, collaboration/productivity, and much more. In this post, I’ll share thoughts on remote and distributed working.

I’ve always loved working in coffee shops. Maybe it’s the allure of being surrounded by people without having to talk to them. Maybe it’s the opportunity to strike up conversations with like-minded strangers. Maybe it’s just growing up in the Bay Area where people are on their laptops in public locations. More recently, I’ve been using time at coffee shops as a serendipitous way to learn more about remote work.

Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might be the Worst Idea in Tech – The Glowforge Blog

“Both/And” Leadership

Idea in Brief

The Problem

We look to leaders to make consistent decisions, keep a steady course, and align an organization’s culture. But leaders typically face multiple demands that conflict with one another, and it’s a mistake to assume there are cut-and-dried choices.

Why It Happens

Strategic paradoxes are essentially dilemmas that cannot be resolved. Tensions continually arise between today’s needs and tomorrow’s (innovation paradoxes), between global integration and local interests (globalization paradoxes), and between social missions and financial pressures (obligation paradoxes).

Why we implemented an Urgent Task Parachute Protocol

Ben Dalziel May 10

As a remote-first company, we put a lot of weight in good, clear, respectful communication, but it’s often hard to articulate why something that feels off may be more corrosive. That presents the risk of missing or not addressing the root cause. That perhaps explains why this post by Cate Huston has stuck with me:

The five types of communication problems that destroy company morale
*There’s a saying in software that all bugs are eventually user interface bugs, because someone has to see them to…*qz.com

Is Slack ruining our jobs — and lives?

Several people are typing.

If you’ve spent any time with Slack, you’ve likely seen this message float below the text field of your company’s communications software.

It can mean a few things: A vibrant discussion is taking place in which you and your colleagues are excitedly collaborating around a central topic. Important news is breaking and everyone wants to know. Or, more often, a nonlinear argument is unfurling as everyone tries to get the last word in first, and chaos envelops the very system meant to keep you organized.

Book Review: Accelerate – slashdeploy – Medium

Adam Hawkins Apr 29, 2018

I was excited when Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren published Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. Their last book, The DevOps Handbook, laid out a repeatable path for moving towards the DevOps value stream.

I didn’t know what expect from Accelerate, but I hoped the authors would delight me again. This review includes my thoughts, highlights, and lastly a recommendation on who it’s best for. Skip to the end if you’re just interested in the recommendation.