Living APIs, and the Case for GraphQL — Brandur Leach

It’s hard to read exactly where GraphQL stands in the API

world right now. Available publicly since 2015, trends in

APIs aren’t obviously moving in its favor, but not

obviously moving against it either. Interest from the

developer community has been steady throughout even if the

technology isn’t spreading like wildfire.

Its biggest third party proponent is GitHub, who released

Is a Product Executive a Product Manager… or an Executive?

by

**Shaun Juncal, Product Marketing

at

ProductPlan**

Fear of Process or How to Scale the Team Without Getting “Corporate”

AI and Compute

We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period). Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (an 18-month doubling period would yield only a 12x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.

How to Have More Impactful Communication with Two Key Skills

I blinked away the tears.

Team morale was crumbling. Co-workers, many I considered friends, were leaving the company. I was at a meeting with senior leaders, and I had just expressed concern that the way the company ran projects might be hurting the team — a team that I cared so much about and where I had invested years of my life.

The Magic of Co-Leadership: Unlock a More Powerful Way to Work

I was halfway up the four-story vertical ropes course, when my course partner at the leadership retreat decided she couldn’t continue any further. We agreed she would energetically cheer me on as I continued. I kept climbing and nearly got to the top, but eventually I had to stop as well.

Looking down from the top, I initially felt some pride and surprise that I got as far as I did, despite my fear of heights. But soon afterwards, a sense of loneliness hit me — there wasn’t anyone to share the accomplishment with. Being the most effective I could be on my own only took me so far.

RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers – Inside Intercom

Prioritization is a perennial challenge when building a product roadmap. How do you decide what to work on first?

If you’ve put the effort into brainstorming new ideas, finding opportunities for improvement, and collecting feedback, you’ll have a solid product roadmap full of good ideas. But the order in which you tackle those ideas deserves just as much thought. You need to take the time to prioritize well.

Email, the Micro-Meetings Eating Our Days – 500ish Words

“You’ve Got Mail” via Giphy

And our time. And our lives…

There are two things at work that everyone seems to universally hate: email and meetings. And I think the hatred stems from the same basic reason: they’re both black holes in which time enters and never returns. Sometimes such a use of time is worthwhile and necessary. But far too many emails and meetings are quagmires that distract us all from doing actual work.

What It Takes to Think Deeply About Complex Problems

hh5800/Getty Images

The problems we’re facing often seem as complex as they do intractable. And as Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” So what does it take to increase the complexity of our thinking?

Too many leaders default to looking at decisions as either-or: The answer is right or wrong, good or bad, win or lose. This binary thinking has a built-in limitation: Overrelying on any given solution eventually generates the opposite problem.

Delegate outcomes, not activities.

Do you consider yourself “a doer”?

That person who enjoys doing the work, fine-tuning the details, meddling in the weeds of how it’ll all work? Then you probably have trouble delegating as a leader.

I know I do.

For so many managers and leaders — especially those of us who are used to be the person doing the work and are now handing off the work to others — learning to delegate is, well, tricky, if not painful.

Battling Perfectionism

This was first published on my mailing list The Looking Glass. Every week, I answer a reader’s question.

Photo by Zac Turner

How do you beat perfectionism?

So this question assumes that perfectionism is something that *should* be beaten, which I don’t think is always true. For example, if I’m getting open heart surgery, I’d hope very dearly that my surgeon was a perfectionist. I’d wish the same for flight controllers at airports, nuclear weapons engineers, firefighters, the people who program self-driving cars… you get the point. In some cases, mistakes are incredibly costly. So having a rigorous culture that prevents them can be an excellent thing.

The most common problem I’ve seen in product/engineering process

Image from here

The first time I became aware of this problem wasn’t at work at all. In fact, this is a common problem in any sort of situation where one party is seeking help from another party.

I was in Seattle with my boyfriend for Thanksgiving couple years ago. On Wednesday night, I realized mid-dinner I had forgotten to bring my toothbrush and toothpaste. I asked the waitress:

Creating Success, Together

This is the final part of a 6-part series of blog posts based on a talk I prepared called Successfully Derailed Product. It’s about the ways in which we define and talk about “success” influence what – and how – we build. See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

We want to be careful how we create process. The fastest way to a mediocre team is to define your process around mediocrity. A slow but sure way to a mediocre team is to define your processes to gradually push them towards putting their own self interest front and centre – like the conclusions the guy drew from the promotion process we talked about earlier.

Five Points-Whittier Neighborhood History

The Story of Five Points

Interior Rice’s Tap Room and Oven.

Baist’s real estate atlas of surveys of Denver, Col. (Plate 5)

The First to Extend Beyond the Bounds of Denver

Five Points and Whittier are adjoining Denver neighborhoods, and the first to extend beyond the bounds of Denver’s original Congressional Grant. Each neighborhood was created and initially shaped during a long period of growth from the early 1870s to the silver crash of 1893, a time when Denver was amongst the fastest growing cities in the United States and exemplified what the historian Gunter Barth describes as the “instant city.” Each has seen its fortunes wax and wane over a near one-and-a-half century history, and, in that time, has been home to numerous Denver communities, a connection recalled and honored long after people had dispersed.

Five lessons I learned as a manager in a massively fast-growing startup.

I built a Progressive Web App and published it in 3 app stores. Here’s what I learned.

One month of work, several hundred dollars, and lots of red tape.

I recently published Chavah Messianic Radio, a Pandora-like music player, as a Progressive Web App and submitted it to the 3 app stores (Google Play, iOS App Store, Windows Store).

The process was both painful and enlightening. Here’s what I learned.

Planning Your Own Chaos Day

What is a Chaos Day?

A Chaos Day is a dedicated team day focused on using chaos engineering to reveal weaknesses in your system. We’ve all heard of hack days and hack weeks, where you focus on building new features. Well, a Chaos Day is focused on building more resilient systems by breaking things on purpose.

What is Chaos Engineering?

Thoughtful, planned experiments designed to reveal weaknesses in your system. Read more about Chaos Engineering here: Chaos Engineering: the history, principles, and practice.

My Manager Toolkit

I thought it’d be useful to share out some of the tools and resources that I use as part of my workflow as a manager. Below is a link to a number of Google docs, which if it sounds interesting to you I encourage you to copy for your own purposes. I’d also love to hear what tools you use in the responses!

Tracking Work

Last year I ended up building out a spreadsheet to help schedule various projects for my team, and it ended up also being super useful to track work throughout the year. It focuses on the week level, which is high-level enough that it’s more useful than looking at work tickets in JIRA and comes in handy for review time to look back on what folks actually did.

EX-99.1

Remote Teams – rebecca – Medium

I was recently tagged into a conversation on Twitter. The thread started with this summary of findings about open plan offices:

In response, @chrisbiscardi wondered:

I’m partway through my PhD on remote teams so I know that research exists. Unfortunately, much of it lives behind academic paywalls (and let’s be honest, the articles are long and often difficult to read). As someone who is currently researching remote teams and who has worked in multiple remote teams, I’m deeply invested in the topic and the community, so I thought I’d put together a short answer to @chrisbiscardi’s request.

What Does It Mean to Be an Effective Tech Lead?

The first time I took on a tech lead role early in my career, I had little clue what I was doing.

Overnight, I found myself suddenly responsible for the technical and project output of a team of four engineers at an underdog startup — even though I had no more training, mentoring, or tools for my new role than the day before, when I was still just a senior individual contributor.

First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself

First principles thinking, which is sometimes called reasoning from first principles, is one of the most effective strategies you can employ for breaking down complicated problems and generating original solutions. It also might be the single best approach to learn how to think for yourself.

The first principles approach has been used by many great thinkers including inventor Johannes Gutenberg, military strategist John Boyd, and the ancient philosopher Aristotle, but no one embodies the philosophy of first principles thinking more effectively than entrepreneur Elon Musk.

If you want to know how we ended up in a cyber dystopia, read Ready Player One

When Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was published in 2011, the reviews were ecstatic, beatific. It was an “enchanting,” “accessible” “nerdgasm” full of “fascinating social commentary” that one critic claimed was “the best science fiction novel I’ve read in a decade.”

The book imagined America in the 2040s entirely through the lens of the 1980s, or at least a narrow sliver of the era: the formative video games, movies, and other nerd-friendly pop culture for the people who came of age during this particular decade. As the novel’s world descends into chaos and poverty, thanks to climate change and a fossil-fuel crisis, most of its citizens spend their days traversing the OASIS, a virtual reality world created by an “eccentric” ‘80s kid named James Halliday.

Guild Week at Strava – strava-engineering – Medium

Recently, the Strava Engineering team took a weeklong break from regular product work to focus attention on our core technology platforms. We coined this effort Guild Week. Before explaining Guild Week, it’d be useful to understand what a “Guild” is at Strava.

A Brief History of Guilds at Strava

Like most software companies, Strava started off with a single product development team, consisting of engineers, product managers, and designers. Engineers and designers were “free agents”, and worked on whatever project was highest priority. Eventually, we reached a point where that single team became unwieldy to manage. Product managers couldn’t plan for the medium / long term because they couldn’t count on having engineering and design support. Engineers couldn’t develop expertise in specific areas of the product, and also didn’t have the time to make longer-term investments in more complex product features.