It’s been three months since I joined The Trade Desk. Looking back, I’ve led significant work around our tooling and built good working relationships. But I also struggle to actively identify and learn what I don’t know about technology and business. I will strive to accumulate knowledge per this article in the coming months.

Software Engineering ⚙️Incident Metrics in SRE

This seminal report upends our understanding of the famous Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) metric. It shows that, due to the positive skewness of incident lengths, such summary metrics are unreliable and, thus, useless as a tool to make decisions. I expected median or percentile-based metrics to be more reliable, but the author proves they are no better.

CommonJS is hurting JavaScript

I always struggled when I tried to write and publish working ECMAScript (vs. CommonJS) modules. I thought it was due to my ignorance, but knowing that others also struggle because of poor interoperability was reassuring.

Jest with ECMAScript Modules

As I read about CJS and ES modules, I learned that mocking ES modules is difficult because static import statements in the ES module system are evaluated before the rest of the code, which prevents other code from changing the loaded modules. So if I want to mock the dependency, I should use dynamic import in the tested module, which sounds painful.

People ❤️Simplify your Strategic Leadership Framework With These Four Components

The author’s four components to lead an organization are:

• Direction — Where are we heading?Guiding Policy— How do we make decisions?Structured Goals — What do we focus on right now?Performance — How do we measure progress?

Even though I no longer lead a team, I see I can apply them to my projects to give more autonomy to my colleagues. At a project level, the direction is the problem statement; the guiding policy is our ways of working; the structured goals are project milestones; and performance is the KPIs.

Scarred for the Rest of My Career?

This research studied the relationship between NBA basketball players’ performance and their college coaches’ abusive leadership. It found that the adverse effect of abusive leadership lingers even after the relationship has ended. Just like any traumas, work abuses are not something one can just overcome overnight.

How I do (and don’t) prepare a talk for a tech conference

A staff engineer’s primary tool is influence, where the ability to communicate an idea is critical. Even though the blog post is mostly about public speaking, the general principle to focus on what I want the audience to take away still holds.

Business 💰Sony’s confidential PlayStation secrets just spilled because of a Sharpie

Some interesting numbers on AAA games were leaked from Sony’s statements about Microsoft’s Activision acquisition: over $200 million to develop The Last of Us Part II, Call of Duty earning more than $1.5 billion globally on PlayStation alone.