Fabio Cicerchia @ DevPath | Newsletter

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #138

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 07:00:15 GMT

👋 Hi, this is Fabio with the biweekly issue of the DevPath Newsletter.
Each issue delivers curated content for engineers and leaders in tech,
ideal for busy people as it gives an extract of the latest news and trends.

Understanding Motives

Architecture

The Pyramid of Alerting
Reading time: 8 mins

We all came across it before. Your company is processing thousands of data points. All goes well on most days, but today, the pipelines are saying "not today". You start digging and find out that the issue is due to a single invalid or malformed message. You check the message for issues, identify the breaking issue (it's a new date format, who would have guessed) and implement a fail-safe for this specific issue.

Career

16 System Design Concepts I Wish I Knew Before the Interview.
Reading time: 13 mins

To excel in system design, one of the most crucial aspects is to develop a deep understanding of fundamental system design concepts such as Load Balancing, Caching, Partitioning, Replication, Databases, and Proxies.
Through my own experiences, I’ve identified 16 key concepts that can make a significant difference in your ability to tackle system design problems. These concepts range from understanding the intricacies of API gateway and mastering load-balancing techniques to grasping the importance of CDNs and appreciating the role of caching in modern distributed systems. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of these essential ideas and the confidence to apply them in your next interview.

Health

Emotions At Work: How To Manage Them Effectively
Reading time: 8 mins

Here I share my advice to help you harness your emotions and listen to what they're telling you. I also provide advice for managers to help steer their team members' emotional currents.

Methodologies

The Art Of Looking Back: A Critical Reflection For Individual Contributors
Reading time: 12 mins

Discover the importance of critical reflective practice and challenge some beliefs about reflection and its role in our work and growth. Kristian Mikhel suggests a critical reflective routine for individual contributors and gives some practical recommendations that will make reflection meaningful and actionable.

Productivity

Why an Engineering Manager Should Not Review Code
Reading time: 8 mins

When discussing team organization, I am often asked: “Why don’t you have the tech lead manage the team?” My response is to hiss like a vampire exposed to holy water. When the follow-up question is: “Given you want managers on your teams, can the manager still perform code reviews?” I burst into flames.

Resources

9 One-on-one meeting templates
Reading time: 11 mins

One-on-one meetings are the most important opportunities for managers to give and get feedback, build trust and discuss growth and development with their direct reports. While every team member is different (and your one-on-ones should be tailored to each person!) here are 9 different types of one-on-one meeting templates to jump-start your next conversation.

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #137

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 06:30:27 GMT

We encourage you to take risks

Architecture

DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report
Reading time: 23 min

The InfoQ Trends Reports provide InfoQ readers with an opinionated high-level overview of the topics we believe architects and technical leaders should pay attention to. In addition, they also help the InfoQ editorial team focus on writing news and recruiting article authors to cover innovative technologies.
In addition to this report and the updated DevOps and Cloud InfoQ trends graph, an accompanying podcast is available that features several editors and friends of InfoQ discussing these trends.

Health

7 Telltale Signs You Have a Toxic Engineering Manager ☣️
Reading time: 15 min

Early in my developer career, a dismissive comment from a manager highlighted the impact of leadership. It's clear: many engineers leave bad managers, not jobs. Software is human-centric. Effective leadership requires empathy, communication, and technical skill.

Methodologies

Don’t Try to Be the “Fun Boss” — and Other Lessons in Ethical Leadership
Reading time: 6 min

The ethical misconduct of leaders in not a new concern, but it seems to be a more prevalent concern today. So what should today’s leaders do to build trust with their teams and the public? Showing your team that you exercise caution, take calculated risks, and will adhere to organizational principles will go a long way toward gaining their trust. Trying to be liked and known as “the fun boss” can tarnish your reputation in the long run. It’s OK to stay out of the limelight and keep some space between you and your team. It sends signals that you are there for their professional benefit and that they can rely on you when needed. Spending too much time trying to get noticed or having a “win at all costs” mentality to get ahead can put you (and your team) at a higher risk of engaging in unethical behavior. Being a more self-aware leader will help to keep you (and your team) on track.

Productivity

How platform teams get stuff done
Reading time: 22 min

Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.

Security

OWASP Kubernetes Top Ten
Reading time: 2 min

When adopting Kubernetes, we introduce new risks to our applications and infrastructure. The OWASP Kubernetes Top 10 is aimed at helping security practitioners, system administrators, and software developers prioritize risks around the Kubernetes ecosystem. The Top Ten is a prioritized list of these risks. In the future we hope for this to be backed by data collected from organizations varying in maturity and complexity.

Resources

Backlog Refinement Cards
Reading time: 2 min

Welcome to the repository for Backlog Refinement Cards! This repository contains a series of cards designed to assist in the sprint planning and backlog refinement process, allowing for more reducing and handling complexity in software development projects.

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback, fill out a quick survey or share it with others!

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #136

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 06:30:19 GMT

The 4 Ps for Change and Release: Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

Honesty goes both ways

Architecture

The 7 Software Architecture Books Experienced Developers Need to Read
Reading time: 10min

Since many books can confuse you, I have only selected seven best and must-read books from the software architect's perspective, with a couple of System design and Software development books.
Since architecture is a vast subject and highly depends upon the domain you are working in, it's impossible to learn everything you need to design software from top to bottom. Still, these books will give you the tools and techniques to build robust, secure, and maintainable software.

Health

The State of Workplace Burnout 2023
Reading time: 2 min

Burnout is rife. It is also preventable. The State of Workplace Burnout report examines the trends in burnout and its relationship to workplace factors. A close examination is made to understand how burnout mitigation strategies can be utilised as part of the attraction, engagement, and retention strategy.

Methodologies

Manage process before people
Reading time: 4 min

If you want to run a company that's light on full-time managers, you have to focus on managing processes before people. The traditional paradigm of a reporting manager that's constantly following up with their reports, conducting daily stand-up meetings, weekly 1-1s, and all other forms of intensive supervision, needs to be (mostly) replaced with an asynchronous, self-managing paradigm instead.

Productivity

10 Ideas From the Best Book on Engineering Management
Reading time: 7 min

I recently became an engineering manager, and this book had a huge impact on my decision.
What I appreciated most is that Will Larson, the author, is highly opinionated about various management topics. He clarifies a nebulous role through an actionable set of systems.
There are parts of the book that are not super relevant for me yet (like being a manager of managers), but I know I can come back to those parts if/when they become relevant.

Mix

2023 CNCF Annual Survey
Reading time: N/A

Since 2016, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has conducted community-driven research. In partnership with Linux Foundation Research, this year's CNCF survey will take a quick, high-level view on containers, Kubernetes and other cloud-native adoption trends. Then, it will look at the tools, projects and challenges facing the users of these technologies.

Resources

Awesome Runbook
Reading time: N/A

A curated list of awesome runbook documents, guidebooks, software, and resources.

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Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #135

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 06:30:19 GMT

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

— Linus Torvalds

Mind Reader

Architecture

Modernisation Platform
Reading time: 3 min

The Modernisation Platform is a hosting platform where Ministry of Justice teams can host and modernise applications which are not suitable for the Cloud Platform.
This repository holds the Ministry of Justice’s Modernisation Platform concepts, team information, team guide, and user guide to help onboard and support the users of our service.

Career

Compensation Survey Report 2023
Reading time: 30 min

CTO Craft’s tech leadership compensation survey, in partnership with Albany Partners, focused on discovering a transparent overview of engineering leadership compensation. Our aim was to find compensation norms, trends and patterns in salaries and compensation across tech leadership.
This report provides technology leaders with essential compensation data, including:
Base salary insights and satisfaction levels
What other compensation benefits tech leaders receive, and which they
most value
What the most common LTIP structure is a breakdown of vesting cycles

Health

More Than 50% of Managers Feel Burned Out
Reading time: 8 min

More than 50% of managers report feeling burned out, a number slightly higher than employees more broadly. The causes include the challenges of the pandemic combined with experiencing three hallmarks of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and a perceived lack of professional accomplishment. How can organizations better support these employees? Research from Microsoft on their own workforce explores the different ways burnout can be harmful to managers, and suggests five strategies for combatting it.

Methodologies

Rethinking infrastructure as code from scratch
Reading time: 18 min

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure complexity, and the current state of infrastructure as code.
This is problem space that many talented people are tackling. In particular I’m impressed by the work and demos that I’m seeing coming from Winglang and System Initiative. The cloud infrastructure industry seems poised at the edge of a next big leap of innovation, and I’m thrilled by it. If you haven’t taken a look at these projects please do so. Believe me they are worth your time.

Productivity

25 Hints You’re Working on a High Performing Team
Reading time: 4 min

Let’s say you have a couple days to interact with a team. How might you know that you’re working with a high performing team? How might you — John — know that this is a good fit for you personally?
Here’s the personal checklist I came up with. Of course, it is always a journey. You’re never done. As I point out in #1, my primary “signal” is a growth mindset and some awareness of what better might look like. You’ll frequently find teams with incredibly capable individuals…but they are not operating as a team. Similarly, teams exist in a broader system. A great team cannot function in a broken org. Also…sometimes a team is the black sheep. They’re struggling, but the org isn’t exactly helping.

Resources

The State of DevOps Report 2024: Platform Engineering Edition Survey
Reading time: 6 min

The State of DevOps 2024 Survey is now live, and we're looking for your input! Read on for more about the focus of this year’s report, what we hope to learn, the voices you’ll see represented in it, and what to expect when it launches.

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #134

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 06:30:54 GMT

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

— Edward Morgan Forster

Technical debt

Architecture

Kubernetes Infrastructure At Medium
Reading time: 7 mins

Kubernetes has a ton of complexity, and has an unlimited number of possible configurations based on an organization’s needs. At Medium, we have a lot of pride around how well we’ve been able to shape Kubernetes to our own needs. That doesn’t take away from how excited we are to explore new ways to enhance our infrastructure, while making use of new technologies that help us improve reliability and scalability along the way.

Career

When promotions become punishment
Reading time: 3 mins

The world is full of talented, capable people who'd rather put their own efforts to direct use than manage others. But the natural inclination is to promote senior contributors up a managerial ladder, and out of the trenches. This often ends poorly, turning the promotion into a punishment.
It's usually not that these potential managers don't like working with others. Quite the contrary. I've found that nothing motivates ambitious people like working close together with other talented individuals. It's also usually not that they're uncomfortable being senior, in terms of setting a direction for the work. It's that they don't want the responsibility, and associated guilt, that comes with managing others. Especially when there's a need for correction.

Health

Perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome and Anxiety
Watching time: 48 mins

Working in the tech industry can sometimes make us feel inferior. It is easy to start believing that everyone knows more, or finds the work easier. When we’re surrounded by so many clever people, how help but judge ourselves against them and our work against theirs? Impostor syndrome - the belief that you don’t deserve to be where you are, and perfectionism - a need to work to impossibly high standards, are exhausting. Learn how to spot these destructive thought patterns in yourself, how to manage anxiety and procrastination and how to start being kinder to yourself, because you’re awesome!

Methodologies

Backlog Refinement Cards: Use the Benefits of Gamification for Backlog Refinement
Reading time: 5 mins

In the landscape of Agile software development, backlog refinement stands as a cornerstone of project success. This process, which involves the prioritization, often estimation and decomposition of work into manageable pieces, is fundamental for effective sprint planning and efficient project execution. An innovative tool known as the Backlog Refinement Cards has been created to give a new gamified option to this process. Designed to decrease the complexity and size of backlog items before implementation, these cards are a game-changer in enhancing project predictability.

Productivity

How To Become a 10x Dev: An Essential Guide
Reading time: 18 mins

Software development is a team sport. Your individual performance doesn't matter as much as the performance of your whole team and company.
By improving how you work, you only ADD to your team's performance. By improving how everyone works, you MULTIPLY your team's performance.
Multiplying the whole team's performance will put you on a much faster lane for being noticed and promoted than being a crazy efficient individual contributor.
Boosting other people's performance requires a different mindset and approach than boosting your individual performance. In this article, I'll show you 16 proven ways to multiply your team's performance (or even the whole company).

Resources

A slack clone in 5 lines of bash
Reading time: 20 mins

This paper shows how suc implements those features. suc stays small by leveraging the consistent and composable primitives offered by modern UNIX implementations.

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #133

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 06:30:08 GMT

You can’t teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.

— Seymour Papert

Capacity Planning

Architecture

Minimum Viable Architecture
Reading time: 5 mins

Minimum Viable Architecture is the architecture that’s good enough for the product to be released and needs to be continually improved during the lifetime of the product.
Many software architects try to design the entire product upfront and have persistent issues of over-architecture. They try to think about what might be needed in one year, and in most cases, it ends up in the bin because their work was based on assumptions and not actual requirements.

Career

When and How to Resign from a Management Position
Reading time: 14 mins

Quitting as a manager is always difficult, and it's not an easy decision. However, it's one of the many questions we've heard before.
In the process of growing Lighthouse and writing this blog, we have talked to a lot of leaders. Often, they share a challenge their facing. Many of our posts are inspired by those conversations.
While many of the questions are innocent ("How do I grow my people when there is lack of promotion opportunities?" or "What do I talk about in a 1 on 1?") Some of these challenges are much more sensitive, like the one above.

Health

37 Algorithms For Life
Reading time: 6 mins

Life is full of decisions, big and small.
Algorithms help us make better choices. They are rules or principles that can be followed to achieve a desired outcome.
In our daily lives, we follow many algorithms. For example, when we plan our daily schedule or make a to-do list, we use an algorithm to manage our time effectively.
We use algorithms to manage our finances by creating and sticking to a budget. We use decision-making tools to analyse our options and make informed choices.

Methodologies

How to make an Impact as a Platform Product Manager
Reading time: 7 mins

I thought about what I enjoyed the most and my achievements. I also thought about my failures and what I learned from them, the organisations I worked in, their culture, and their context. More thinking and less writing, because I wanted this to be a very transparent and actionable piece of content.
As much as I kept my advice generic, some parts might only resonate with some Platform PMs and might only apply to some. After all, in product management, one size does not fit all.

Productivity

The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal
Reading time: 7 mins

Being a CEO can be a lonely job–there is no obvious person in whom to confide. Keeping a journal can fill that void, by giving a new leader a chance for structured reflection of recent past events and decisions, and mental rehearsal for future ones. Despite the time and discipline it takes to keep a journal, it should be part of every new leader’s toolkit.

Mix

Top 10 Engineering KPIs Technical Leaders Should Know
Reading time: 8 mins

Engineering success inevitably translates into product success. But how can engineering success be measured? How do teams introspect on the project's progress and find ways to steer through deadlines with software quality intact? The answer is Engineering KPIs. Most managers track engineering KPIs within a specific, contextual framework like the SPACE research. But the model is not omnipresent, and most teams want to evolve further and have personalized goals and trackers in place.
Using specific measurement frameworks becomes crucial with constantly evolving engineering teams’ work processes —effort alignment, improving work processes, and maximizing efficiency. But why spend so much time tracking some metrics? Today, we will cover the importance of engineering KPIs and which 10 KPIs you should look for.

Resources

Articles, Spreadsheets and Tools

Here is a set of online articles that help understand the mathematics behind Agile. We add to these all the time and would like to hear ideas you have for more.

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback, fill out a quick survey or share it with others!

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #132

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 06:30:05 GMT

If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.
- Martin Fowler

Spreadsheets

Architecture

6 Strategies for Migrating Applications to the Cloud
Reading time: 5 mins

This post outlines 6 different migration strategies we see customers implement to migrate applications to the cloud. These strategies build upon the 5 R’s that Gartner outlined here in 2011. This is the final installment of a three-part series on migrations. The first post in this series introduces the concept of a mass migration, which we’ll simply refer to as “migration” throughout the series, and the second post of the series describes A Process for Mass Migrations to the Cloud. While each of these posts stands on its own, I believe they go better together.

Career

The Software Engineering Skill That Will Set You Apart From Others
Reading time: 8 mins

Looking back at the nearly 40 years of my life, somewhere along the way, something happened that turned me into a shy person. I won’t get into the details of what caused it, you can read more about it in an older article of mine. Old family friends and relatives claim I wasn’t born shy. In fact, I had opinions on everything, and I’d say them out loud, caring very little how it all landed. I remember having engaging conversations with adults 5–10 times my age. Somehow, during my teenage years, however, I lost it all. I lost my voice — not literally — I lost my light, and it took another decade to start claiming it back.

Health

Pomodoro Technique Magic: Leverage It to Improve Well-Being, Not Just Focus
Reading time: 7 mins

Pomodoro technique, please forgive me: I won’t ever leave you again.
Like every respectable productivity nerd, I tried the Pomodoro technique for a while years ago. Then, I don’t know why I stopped. And you know, when you break the chain, restarting is hard.
Recently I gave it another try. I realized how for me, it’s much more than a focusing tool. It safeguards my wellness as a knowledge worker (a content creator, more precisely).
I want to share how with you in this article. It may help you avoid or fix several modern problems caused by endless work sessions tied to a desk. This will improve your productivity even more than the usual focus boost linked to the Pomodoro technique.

Methodologies

O11y Guide - Without Observability It's Just Code
Reading time: 11 mins

Being a developer from my early days in IT, it's been very interesting to explore the complexities of cloud native o11y. Monitoring applications goes way beyond just writing and deploying code, especially in the cloud native world. One thing remains the same, maintaining your organization's architecture always requires that you understand that without observability, it's just code you are deploying.
Let's look at what makes cloud native observability so crucial to your organization's success.

Productivity

Reduce cycle time with effective pull requests
Reading time: 8 mins

A pull request (PR) is (quite literally) a request to pull a change into a project’s code or documentation. It is a popular change management process supported by many VCS providers including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, and others. Typically these come with features to track open pull requests, tools to assist in reviewing the changes, the ability to approve—or reject—PRs, and finally to merge approved PRs.
Teams that adopt continuous deployment (CD) usually want an automated process where merging a PR automatically kicks off the deployment of a new version of the service to production. This is a case where having an effective review process is crucial.

Resources

Top 24 Tips and Tricks with NgInx
Reading time: 10 mins

The role of the web server running in an web-application is very important so that the web application can run perfectly. So, the selection of an web server must also be in accordance with the needs and performance so far. One of the most popular web server in the market currently available is NgInx(engine-ex). So let’s discuss how NgnInx works ?

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #131

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 06:30:08 GMT

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
— Ralph Johnson

Conway's Law for Remote Teams

Architecture

Martin Fowler Was Right: Microservices Suck*
Reading time: 5 mins

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’ “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” is by far one of the most popular books among software developers, yet I wonder just how many software engineers actually read the thing. While that’s certainly not the book that goes into the ins-and-outs of microservices and monoliths, it teaches a fair bit — dare I say everything — to make educated, some might say pragmatic decisions when it comes to building software. The TOC alone is pure gold! Yet 25 years later, the industry still doesn’t seem to have learnt its basic lesson — namely to use the right tool for the right job.
Another big name, one that made his name following just that philosophy, is Martin Fowler. Anyone who is familiar with the concept of continuous refactoring has likely also heard of Martin. He has an entire book on just that, but if you’re lazy or broke, here’s the extremely abridged version: “Always be refactoring. If you touch the code, and you can improve it, improve it, but never optimise early.” There. A book in two sentences. Luckily, he hasn’t just shared his wisdom on refactoring, but many other contemporary software development topics such as architecture, more specifically monoliths and microservices.

Career

How Managers Can Make Time for Their Own Development
Reading time: 7 mins

Managers today must balance their day-to-day work with multiple “ands,” such as delivering on quarterly objectives and thinking strategically. Given these numerous demands, managers tend to deprioritize their own career development. It doesn’t have to be that way. The more managers take control of their development, the better able they’ll be to avoid the common career mistakes that will get in the way of their growth. And the more their team members see the positive impact of investing in their career development, the more likely they are to do the same.

Health

Should There Be a Developer Mental Health Day?
Reading time: 3 mins

Developer burnout is growing and I see little being done to reduce this. The amount of software being created is growing by a growing number of developers. The number of developers burning out will continue to grow.
Developers overworking for free and trying to sprint for months without a break is a process that is working for managers, so they keep doing it (getting more work out of development resources)
Developers overworking plagues software development and developers have less time for development with the increase in teams meetings (But without a change in deadlines).

Methodologies

If You’re Not a T-Shaped Skill Member, You’re Not Doing DevOps Correctly
Reading time: 4 mins

DevOps is not just a methodology; it is a mindset and a cultural shift that emphasizes collaboration, agility, and continuous improvement. By embracing T-shaped skills, organizations can unlock the true potential of DevOps, fostering a workforce that is adaptable, collaborative, and capable of delivering high-quality software at a rapid pace. T-shaped skill members bridge gaps, break down silos, and drive innovation, propelling organizations towards success in the ever-evolving world of software development and operations. So, if you aspire to excel in DevOps, remember that being a T-shaped skill member is not an option but a prerequisite for doing DevOps correctly.

Productivity

Too Many Meetings At Work? Here’s How to Stop the Meeting Madness
Reading time: 13 mins

Too many meetings. I had said those three words way too many times that month. Sometimes as a fleeting comment to myself. Other times in the form of self-pity as this excessive, self-absorbed unhappiness over the current state of my work.
Instead of shouting at the top of my lungs and getting myself out of the rut I had fallen into, I simply accepted it as a way of life “this is how it’s supposed to be and I can’t really do much about it.” After all, I consciously opted in to be a manager and way too many meetings somehow seemed like a part of a manager’s job.
A few months passed by and then things got worse. My scope increased, my team size more than doubled and so did the number of meetings. I absolutely lost control over my time. I was in a constant state of frenzy throughout the day moving from one meeting to the next only to be left exhausted, disoriented and grumpy.

Mix

Better Software Engineering teams — Structures, roles, responsibilities and comparison with common approaches.
Reading time: 13 mins

Software engineering teams can be complicated, and finding a solid approach to structure them for success is not easy. Probably, because there is no single way of doing it. My experience taught me that whilst there is no one-fix-all solution, some approaches have more pros and a higher success rate than others. I want to share and review some of the most common team structures and dig a little bit into a solution that worked well for me across different organisations of various sizes and specialisations. Whilst I don’t have the perfect answer, it could be good as a starting point for any high-performance team of skilled individuals who value contribution and meaning above politics and typical corporate BS, which creeps into organisations too often.

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #130

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 06:30:35 GMT

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are–by definition–not smart enough to debug it.
— Brian W. Kernighan

Game AIs

Architecture

System Design Blueprint: The Ultimate Guide
Reading time: 9 mins

Developing a robust, scalable, and efficient system can be daunting. However, understanding the key concepts and components can make the process more manageable. In this blog post, we’ll explore essential system design components such as DNS, load balancing, API Gateway, and more, along with a concise cheat sheet that can help developers design systems of varying complexity.

Career

Are You Ready to Become a Manager?
Reading time: 7 mins

When you’re working toward a promotion to a management position, proving that you’re ready is just one part of the process. To be a strong manager, you need to be a problem-solver at the highest level. It’s essential to uncover what you don’t know yet. In addition to assembling tangible examples that demonstrate your managerial credentials, take an objective assessment of the gaps in your experience, knowledge, and management skills. To determine which skills and knowledge you need to improve or develop to become an effective first-time manager, ask yourself these 10 questions.

Health

Technological Solutions for Combating Depression and Anxiety
Reading time: 6 mins

Though COVID-19 is no longer classified as a global health emergency, the spike in mental health disorders that accompanied the rapid spread of the virus hasn’t abated.
Following the pandemic, studies found that depressive symptoms grew from a base of about 193 million people worldwide to 246 million, which is about 28%. Anxiety disorders grew 25% from about 298 million people affected to 374 million.
Although these are sobering statistics, the rise in mental health conditions has also meant that more people are comfortable seeking support. As a result, there’s never been more demand for health and wellbeing services with the behavioral health market expected to grow to $105 billion by 2029.
And tech innovators continue to develop solutions that address specific gaps in the treatment pipeline, democratize access to treatment such as therapy and provide tools to manage our wellbeing holistically.

Methodologies

2023 Developer Survey results are in: the latest trends in technology and work from the Stack Overflow community
Reading time: 12 mins

Approximately 90,000 people from all over the world submitted their top picks for tools and programming languages they are using along with details about how long they have been coding at work, school, and otherwise. With such a large response to our 2023 survey, it’s good to keep in mind that our responses are sourced from our tried and true Stack Overflow audience, which means the results are biased towards a community of engaged coders that are actively solving problems. Check out all the new insights on our results microsite.

Productivity

To Build a Top Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort
Reading time: 10 mins

An outdated way of thinking about peak performance is: “maximum effort = maximum results.” But research shows that it doesn’t actually work that way in reality. Here’s what actually works: The 85% rule, which counterintuitively suggests that to reach maximum output, you need to refrain from giving maximum effort. Operating at 100% effort all of the time will result in burnout and ultimately less-optimal results. While the precise number 85% may just be a rule of thumb, it’s a helpful one for managers who want to create high-performance teams without burning people out.

Resources

Build your own X
Reading time: N/A

This repository is a compilation of well-written, step-by-step guides for re-creating our favorite technologies from scratch.

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

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Have a great week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #129

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 06:31:05 GMT

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
— Will Durant

— If The World Was Created By A Programmer

Architecture

The Evolution of Evolutionary Architecture with Rebecca Parsons
Reading time: 37 mins

In Evolutionary Architectures, the book she co-authored, Dr. Rebecca Parsons described the principles and practices that allow architecture to evolve. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about those principles, how they’ve changed between the first and second editions of the book, and what changes we might see in the next few years.

Career

Deciding to leave your (executive) job.
Reading time: 17 mins

Departing an executive job is much messier than leaving an individual contributor role, and will significantly impact the team and company around you. It’s also potentially impactful to your resume; I frequently talk with executives who hate their job, but don’t want to leave because they’re worried it looks bad. “If I just make it to two years, it’ll look great.”

Health

Cognitive Biases in Programming
Reading time: 3 mins

As developers, we’re familiar with the various problems that interfere with our productivity. But often we overlook the broad picture. Some subtle, some huge, some you can do something about, and some you just, well, can’t.

Methodologies

Incident vs. bug: How to distinguish between these two (seemingly) related concepts
Reading time: 8 mins

By tackling these as two separate issues, you can plan and prioritze accordingly. No one needs to be responding to an every-day bug as if it were a 5-alarm fire. On the other hand, it’s probably not a good idea to let an incident live on for weeks-on-end. But if these two are one in the same, it’ll be impossible to make this distinction.

Productivity

42 Short Habits to Defend Your Time From The Chaos of Life
Reading time: 5 mins

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” — Annie Dillard

Resources

15 Essential Terraform Tools to Level Up Your Infrastructure-as-Code Game
Reading time: 3 mins

Unlock the true potential of your Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) projects with these 15 essential Terraform tools. From code analysis to security scanning and documentation generation, these tools are here to streamline your Terraform workflows and elevate your infrastructure management game. Discover the must-have tools to enhance code quality, ensure compliance, and empower you to build robust and scalable infrastructures. Join us in optimizing your Terraform deployments and taking your IaC skills to the next level.

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Fabio Cicerchia - Issue #127

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 06:30:10 GMT

👋 Hi, this is Fabio with the ~~weekly~~ biweekly issue of the DevPath Newsletter.
In every issue, I deliver curated content for developers and leaders in tech,
ideal for busy people as it gives a weekly extract of the latest news and trends.

NOTE: I’m going to slow down a bit, so this newsletter will switch to a biweekly (twice per month) cadence. It’ll allow me more time to provide even better content.

Impostor syndrome

DevOps

Move Over, Dockerfiles! The New Way to Craft Containers
Reading time: 9 mins

Docker has become an immensely popular tool in the world of software development, and for good reason. It provides an excellent way to create, manage, and deploy containers, which in turn enables developers to run applications that work the same way in development and production. However, creating Docker images can sometimes be a pain, as anybody who has accidentally broken the apt cache and triggered an hours-long build by making a minor change can tell you.

Career

5 Engineering Manager Archetypes
Reading time: 16 mins

In today’s tech organisations, you find 2 types of technical leadership roles in teams – Tech Leads and Engineering Managers. Tech Leads are better defined with The Definition of a Tech Lead but the Engineering Manager (EM) role remains unclear. In this article, we will explore 5 Engineering Manager archetypes commonly found in the industry.

The Different Types of Software Architects
Reading time: 8 mins

Software architecture can be a hard thing to pin down. While at times architecture may feel intimidating, anyone writing any code is participating in software architecture. From simple scripts to sprawling distributed systems there is always a software architecture whether planned or not. While every person that writes code participates in architecture, there are some that have the distinct role of shepherding the software architecture of a system. Depending on what kind of system you are working on and the business structure that surrounds it there can be different types of software architects you will encounter.

Mix

5 types of Imposter Syndrome
Reading time: 8 mins

This week I am sharing with you the 5 types of impostor syndrome that were categorised by Dr. Valerie Young. Take a look below and decide which one best describes you.

Low Priority Issues + Time = Relationship Killer
Reading time: 5 mins

A common and tragic pattern exists across all relationships - minor issues, left unfixed for long enough, have an outsized impact on the relationship. Let’s explore an example.

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia @ DevPath - Issue #126

Fri, 26 May 2023 06:30:56 GMT

👋 Hi, this is Fabio with the weekly issue of the DevPath Newsletter.
In every issue, I deliver curated content for developers and leaders in tech,
ideal for busy people as it gives a weekly extract of the latest news and trends.

Strip of the Week

Win-win

Career

Here's the latest version of our Engineering Career Framework
Reading time: 14 mins

Two years ago, we shared the Engineering Career Framework we use at Dropbox. The framework is intended to help our engineers have greater impact in their roles and on their teams. For each role, we outline Core Responsibilities, or CRs—key behaviors that define what impactful work looks like and how to deliver it. We hoped that by providing consistent expectations for each level, we could better help Dropboxers grow in their engineering careers. The framework is now widely used as a reference during interviewing and hiring, performance reviews and calibrations, and the rating and promotion process.

Career path framework for managers: The 5 most important considerations
Reading time: 6 mins

“Do we have a career path framework for managers?” asks one of your newly promoted managers. You knowingly nod: While you don’t have a career path framework for managers yet, it’s something that’s currently on your to-do list or “in the works.” You’re likely the only person who makes up your People Team at the company at the moment (or one of just a few folks on the People Team) – and you’re strapped for time. This is one of many initiatives you have on your never-ending list…

DevOps

Stop Writing Great Runbooks
Reading time: 2 mins

Stop writing great runbooks. Instead, fix your production issues.
When production has an issue, someone gets paged. A common approach to handling pages in production looks like:
* Make sure every page has a clear runbook
* Make sure everyone is trained up on how to run that runbook

Health

Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks
Reading time: 11 mins

For many peopleor many people, back-to-back video meetings are a hallmark of the pandemic era. One conversation ends, another begins, and too often there’s no chance to stretch, pour a glass of water, or just clear your head.
In our latest study of brain wave activity, researchers confirmed what many people sense from experience: Back-to-back virtual meetings are stressful. But the research also points to a simple remedy—short breaks.

Management

The Ultimate One-on-One Meeting Guide: Beat the Awkwardness
Reading time: 24 mins

You know that awkward silence in one-on-one meetings, no matter which side you'd been on. You're not sure where to take the discussion in this semi-informal meeting, so you're just suffering in silence.
Don’t worry, it’s not just you.
It’s every engineering manager and engineering leader ever.

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia @ DevPath - Issue #125

Fri, 19 May 2023 06:31:02 GMT

Strip of the Week

Software Updates

Health

A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup
Reading time: 9 mins

Burnout is the result of chronic stress and, at work, that stress tends accumulate around your experiences of workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. If any are lacking or out of sync, you may be headed toward exhaustion, cynicism, and the feeling of being ineffective. When taken regularly, this short assessment can help you gauge whether you’re on the path to burnout, and where you should focus your attention to make beneficial changes.

Mixed

What Mentors Wish Their Mentees Knew
Reading time: 8 mins

The mentor-mentee relationship is a tango between a junior person and a more senior one; just as in dance, coordination and orchestration between parties is necessary for grace and success. While much has been written about what makes the ideal mentor, comparatively less has attention has been given to the other partner. This gap is unfortunate because, like mentorship, menteeship requires specific behaviors, without which the mentee’s success may be threatened. This article outlines five habits of ideal mentees, providing anecdotes and views from the authors’ combined years of academic experience along the way. While the article focuses on the relationship in academic medicine, the takeaways apply to most any field.

Load Balancing
Reading time: 12 mins

Past a certain point, web applications outgrow a single server deployment. Companies either want to increase their availability, scalability, or both! To do this, they deploy their application across multiple servers with a load balancer in front to distribute incoming requests. Big companies may need thousands of servers running their web application to handle the load.
In this post we're going to focus on the ways that a single load balancer might distribute HTTP requests to a set of servers. We'll start from the bottom and work our way up to modern load balancing algorithms.

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

Fabio Cicerchia @ DevPath - Issue #124

Fri, 12 May 2023 06:31:05 GMT

Strip of the Week

Red Line Through HTTPS

Career

You Hit your Career Peak Early? Prepare Options.
Reading time: 6 mins

Career peak achievements may also come at widely diverse times. We expect people in physical careers, like athletes or dancers, to peak early, maybe in their 20’s or 30’s. But other careers may also peak earlier than expected. The writer of an Atlantic article (Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think) realized his musical career was over by age 30.

Productivity

All-Remote Meetings
Reading time: 24 mins

"How do you do meetings right?" is a common question asked of all-remote companies like GitLab. The following guide assumes you've already questioned whether the meeting should happen in the first place; if you haven't, start with GitLab's guide to asynchronous workflows and communication.

Project Management

I Planned My 30-Day Routine on A Single 1-Hour Flight — Here’s Exactly How
Reading time: 6 mins

Unlike most think, plans aren’t immovable concrete walls — they’re malleable clay dough.
With time, you’ll get ideas to improve, optimize, and adapt the plan better to your needs.
This isn’t an excuse to reduce the workload on a whim — the problem is then you and not the plan.

Mixed

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar - Volume 28
Reading time: N/A

The Radar is all about tracking interesting things, which we refer to as blips. We organize the blips in the Radar using two categorizing elements: quadrants and rings. The quadrants represent different kinds of blips. The rings indicate what stage in an adoption lifecycle we think they should be in.

The EU's Proposed CRA Law May Have Unintended Consequences for the Python Ecosystem
Reading time: 9mins

After reviewing the proposed Cyber Resilience Act and Product Liability Act, the PSF has found issues that put the mission of our organization and the health of the open-source software community at risk. While we support the stated goals of these policies of increasing security and accountability for European software consumers, we are concerned that overly broad policies will unintentionally harm the users they are intended to protect. We feel that it is important to consider the role vendor-neutral nonprofit organizations—especially public software repositories—play in the modern development of software.

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

DevPath - Issue #123

Thu, 04 May 2023 06:30:12 GMT

Strip of the Week

npm install

Hiring

The top 15 red flags for job seekers—and it’s bad news for leaders who say ‘work hard, play hard’ or ‘we are like family’
Reading time: 3 mins

With a job offer and decent salary at the employer’s disposal, it can be easy to forget that a job interview is a two-way process.
While hiring managers are assessing a candidate’s suitability for the role, candidates are equally sizing up potential employers—and arriving late to an interview, being rude, or dodging questions can act as warning signs for both parties.

Management

5 Reasons You're Stuck In the Weeds, Instead of Spending Your Time Strategically
Reading time: 4 mins

Here are five common mistakes that keep good leaders stuck in the weeds, and how you can get started on a more strategic path.

Productivity

How to protect your calendar against unnecessary meetings
Reading time: 5 mins

Meetings can be a great way for teams and companies to make important product decisions, plan how different features need to be implemented, and keep everyone working towards the same goals. But meetings can also be pointless, hours-long distractions that waste time that could be better spent building and shipping the actual product.

Project Management

WIP, Multi-Tasking, Context Switching (Video)
Reading time: 21 mins

Saying “we need to lower work in progress” is like saying “we should do less” (to people who aren’t versed in the underlying theory). It doesn’t go over well! Instead, it is better to talk about multi-tasking, context switching, plans going stale, and delaying delivering valuable things.

Mixed

The Complete, 20-Step Guide to Ace Public Speaking
Reading time: 13 mins

Public speaking is a valuable skill for entrepreneurs as it can help them effectively communicate their ideas, build credibility and trust with potential investors, partners, and customers, and ultimately grow their businesses. Strong public speaking skills can also enhance an entrepreneur's leadership abilities and overall professional development

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

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DevPath - Issue #122

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 06:31:03 GMT

Strip of the Week

Ex faang

DevOps

State of Platform Engineering Report Volume 1
Reading time: 10 mins

Platform engineering is one of the hottest trends in DevOps and infrastructure. And for good reason: platform engineering is the next evolution of DevOps.
This year, we compiled the best insights from top platform practitioners to answer the most commonly asked questions. The report dives into:
The emergence of platform engineering
The platform tooling landscape
Platform engineering salary comparison
Community growth and opportunities

Management

Assess your manager’s work, engineering leader
Reading time: 6 mins

Here are a few checks that will help you assess if you should copy your manager’s style or develop your own. There are also a few hints on how to manage-up and smuggle some good practices into your supervisor’s work.

Measuring an engineering organization.
Reading time: 13 mins

There is no one solution to engineering measurement, rather there are many modes of engineering measurement, each of which is appropriate for a given scenario. Becoming an effective engineering executive is adding more approaches to your toolkit and remaining flexible about which to deploy for any given request.

Mixed

Dunning Kruger Effect vs. Imposter Syndrome: Overconfidence Opposites
Reading time: 12 mins

Have you ever accomplished something, but you felt undeserving of it? Maybe you got a promotion at work, but you feel like you only got it because of luck. Maybe you got into an Ivy League school, but you feel like it was a mistake and you really weren’t supposed to get accepted. It could feel like you are hiding behind a mask of fraudulence, worried you will be exposed for your perceived deception. If any of these feelings or experiences sound familiar, you most likely have experienced imposter syndrome.
But what about the opposite? Have you ever ignored a warning because you "already know," or brushed off a criticism because you felt you knew better? On the opposite side of imposter syndrome sits overconfidence, otherwise known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

What The Peter Principle, Dunning-Kruger Effect And Imposter Syndrome Look Like In The Workplace
Reading time: 12 mins

With all the challenges people currently face, wouldn’t it be nice to have a great boss? How comforting would it be to have an empathetic, caring, experienced and smart professional during a time of crisis? Sadly, this is not the case for most workers. They, unfortunately, have a boss who hit the “Peter Principle” ceiling or a “Dunning-Kruger” supervisor.

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DevPath - Issue #121

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 06:30:30 GMT

Strip of the Week

Technical Debt

DevOps

Platform Engineering 101: What You Need to Know about This Hot New Trend
Reading time: 10 mins

Successful platform teams have a mission statement that fits the overall goals of the organization, proactively defines the role of the team within the organization, and inspires your engineers.
By conducting user research, soliciting user feedback, and getting internal buy-in from stakeholders, the platform team can gain a holistic understanding of developers’ pain points and shared challenges across the organization
Successful platform teams don’t reinvent the wheel.
Internal developer portals provide a UI with service catalog capabilities that developers can use to access the underlying Internal Developer Platform. In contrast, Internal Developer Platforms remove toil and repetitive work and drive standardization by design.

Hiring

How this career hype doc gets you hired and promoted
Reading time: 7 mins

Hype Doc’s are a great framework that anyone can use at any stage in their career, from beginners to folks in managerial positions to reflect on your achievements and build a case for your next raise or promotion.

Management

The Engineering Manager
Reading time: 22 mins

All organisations waste a huge amount of time believing that they are making progress on decisions, when in fact they’re just involved in the theatre of decision making. This happens through indirect actions that feel like progress is being made, but in fact contribute nothing to it. Small changes can speed up progress dramatically.
This post is an expansion of an internal note that I circulated at work, mostly as advice to myself rather than for anyone in particular. This is because the behaviours that I’m going to outline are unbelievably easy to fall into when you are trying to create ideas, gain consensus, and ultimately make decisions. They feel like progress — little pushes that you can do and feel good about — but ultimately they just create delay.

Methodologies

A Framework for Prioritizing Tech Debt
Reading time: 6 mins

Usually this time will come as your business starts to scale and earlier decisions made for the sake of time start to become bottlenecks to new work. But then the question becomes, how do we prioritize paying down some of the debt we've accrued when it's competing with our bandwidth to build new features?

Security

The State of Secrets Sprawl 2023
Reading time: 30 mins

Hard-coded secrets have never been a more significant threat to the security of people, enterprises, and even countries worldwide. IT systems, open-source, and entire software supply chains are vulnerable to exploiting keys left by mistake in source code.
As the world digital footprint grows, millions of such keys accumulate every year, not only in public spaces such as code-sharing platforms but especially in closed spaces such as private repositories or corporate IT assets. In other words, secrets sprawl on GitHub is only the tip of the iceberg.

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

DevPath - Issue #120

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 06:30:54 GMT

Strip of the Week

AIOps

Development

Your Job Is NOT to Write Code. Five Other Tech Skills to Master to Become a Complete Developer.
Reading time: 10 mins

We instinctively equate programming with writing code. Because of it, we focus primarily on code design and creation skills: mastering languages and frameworks, clean code, design patterns, TDD, architecture.
But creating new code is only a fraction of what we do every day. We spend much more time navigating, searching, analyzing, reviewing, and debugging code than writing.
Though these activities seem straightforward, they require as specialized skills and experience as coding. Mastering them is what separates true senior programmers from the crowd. And what makes you stand out and get noticed at a new job.
In this post, I'll look at the key traits of professional software development, how they impact what you do every day, and explore what skills do you need to become a complete programmer.

Hiring

On hiring
Reading time: 8 mins

In this article, I want to discuss hiring processes. I’ve come from a software engineering background, and have interviewed hundreds if not thousands of software engineers, and likely hired over a hundred. I’ve also been involved in hiring processes and in the interviews for product managers, product designers and program managers as well as people managers and senior leadership. This has a leaning towards hiring for software engineers, but I believe is generally applicable.

Management

My Expectations for Managers
Reading time: 7 mins

When working with a new manager that’s reporting to me for the first time, I like to share this document. Hopefully, it helps us get on the same page about our shared expectations for your role. I hold myself to the same bar on all of these – you can expect the same things from me that I expect from you.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re Frustrated with Your Team
Reading time: 7 mins

Today’s managers are under a lot of pressure. When it’s a constant strain to get work done, it’s easy to have a short fuse. When expectations aren’t met, the brain short-circuits to judgment and reaction. This is exactly the opposite of what your employees need. In healthy workplace cultures, leaders know how to balance accountability for results with empathy. One way to do this is to aim for reflection instead of reaction. These six questions will help managers revisit their expectations and make sure they’re centering empathy in their attempts to encourage performance.

Methodologies

Daily Standup Greatness!
Reading time: 3 mins

These are the infamous 3 questions associated with the Daily Standup (also called Daily Scrum). Using this format for your Daily Standups is a guaranteed way to ensure this event sounds like a verbal status report, is boring, and is considered wasteful by the team members.

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

DevPath - Issue #119

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 06:30:51 GMT

DevPath delivers a curated newsletter for developers and leaders in tech. A side project by Fabio Cicerchia. Ideal for busy people as it gives a weekly extract of the latest news and trends.

Strip of the Week

Just do it

Career

Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content meant for other roles
Reading time: 14 mins

As I learned from The Startup of You Podcast, in order to stand out in your career, you need a competitive advantage.
In my opinion, one of the greatest tools to gain competitive advantage in a tech career is hidden in plain sight: it’s the wealth of information out there made for people in roles you work with.

DevOps

DevEx Principles: Minimize switching contexts
Reading time: 5 mins

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.

Leadership

Leadership Tips
Reading time: N/A

Management

Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams)
Reading time: 7 mins

Learning how to manage is a long race - it takes many years and each lap offers new learnings. Along the way, anchors emerge that can help orient a manager when a number of other variables are in flux.
Below we offer a number of these anchors. They are based on philosophy, experience, and analysis; we hope they’ll be of some use.

Running your engineering onboarding program.
Reading time: 17 mins

Most companies say that it takes three to six months for newly hired engineers to fully ramp up. Engineering leaders know it’s impolitic to admit that it takes their team longer than three to six months to onboard new engineers, so that’s what they say out loud, but they generally believe it takes longer for a new engineer to become fully productive. They also know that their most impactful engineers are still becoming more productive after years with the company.

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback or fill out a quick survey and/or share it with others!

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Have a great rest of the week 😉

DevPath - Issue #118

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 06:31:00 GMT

DevPath delivers a curated newsletter for developers and leaders in tech. A side project by Fabio Cicerchia. Ideal for busy people as it gives a weekly extract of the latest news and trends.

Strip of the Week

A glimpse of the future

Architecture

50 Points You Must Know About Microservices
Reading time: 3 mins

Development

End-of-Life Software: Definition, Risks & Solutions
Reading time: 12 mins

Nothing is built to be permanent; the same applies to software too. If you're still running the same old software for a long time, you are in big trouble. But don't worry, we've got you covered! This post highlights the end-of-life software risks and offers tips on a smoother transition to a new solution.

Management

Engineering Management: A Comprehensive Guide
Reading time: 11 mins

Are you looking to enter the exciting world of engineering management? This comprehensive guide is designed to provide you with all the information you need to make an informed decision on whether this field is the right fit for you. Learn about the different types of engineering management positions, what skills and qualifications are required, and what salaries you can expect. Whether you're still exploring your options or are ready to take the next step in your career, this guide has something for you!

Health

How to Tell If a Potential Employer Has a Burnout Culture
Reading time: 9 mins

How can you identify whether a potential employer has a burnout culture? Will the company support your well-being and productivity? Or will they leave you exhausted and looking for a new job again? The authors offer signals to look for, questions to ask, and ways to evaluate answers during your interview process.

Mix

We’re No Longer Sunsetting the Free Team Plan
Reading time: 3 mins

After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan. Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan.

Thank you for making it to the end! 🤗

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please send me feedback or fill out a quick survey and/or share it with others!

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Have a great rest of the week 😉