The reorg had finally happened last Friday. The team memberships are finalized, old meetings canceled, and new ones set up. We still need to tackle issues such as splitting shared responsibilities across the teams. But I am glad that we pulled the trigger. The three-week-long limbo put a lot of stress on the engineers. Now, we can look towards the future.
Software Engineering ⚙️
TC39 proposal for chaining errors
Though I don’t code Javascript anymore, I am still excited about the proposal. It will make error handling far more convenient in Javascript.
Benchling’s double-writes approach to incrementally adopting GraphQL
TheI’velity to find and follow a gradual migration path is the org’s bread and butter of software engineering. This article is a perfect example in a large web application.
People ❤️
On Direction ‘Versus’ Empowerment
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been a bit frustrated that my org’s leaders mandated decisions that I felt the individual teams should own. Reading this article made me realize that different circumstances call for different types of leadership. Still, I should share my frustration with my manager.
How to Create an Individual Development Plan
The growth conversations in my org revolve around upcoming promotions. Managers at Square often use the promotion packet template to track their reports’ progress. That helps prepare for the next promotion cycle, but there is a significant gap: the promotion packet template doesn’t track our growth outside Square’s definition of progress. Therefore, the internal training team recommended creating a development plan for everyone on the team, and I intend to do so.
Why The Status Quo Is So Hard To Change In Engineering Teams
“Learned helplessness” is a powerful concept that I learned from this article. I’ve seen many engineers overlook problems because “that’s just how it is.”
Cool stuff 😎
To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
I used to say that we should write code as if we were writing prose. This research debunked that. But apparently, it’s not like math either:
Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It’s not the same as language, and it’s not the same as math and logic.
youngk.im 