Think like a Engineering Manager

Off-boarding

Members can leave the company for various reasons, and as a manager, it is important to take action. Hoping for the best is not a strategy. In the case of a low-performing member, I can kindly issue an official warning, set clear objectives for improvement, and re-evaluate the results. If there is a conflict between members, I need to be mindful and go beyond the situation to list our expectations with corresponding actions. Finally, if a member has a big chance to grow at another company, I can have an honest discussion with that member about the trade-offs.

Balance at Work

As an engineering manager, it is important to balance involvement in meetings and getting your hands dirty on some topics. The goal is to become a companion to teams. Here are my two actions to deal with the situation:

Dedicate time for important-but-not-urgent tasks and prioritize them daily.
Categorize work into four lines including management, project support, OKRs, and self-study.

Management

Conduct interviews
Evaluate candidates after interviewing
Conduct sharing sessions
Onboard new members
Onboard teams to projects
Plan resources by assigning teams to projects
Develop strategies for teams
Off-board team members

Project support

Review code
Review documents
Get my hand dirty on several issues

OKRs

Write guidelines
Enhance DevOps toolchain
Provide training sessions

Self-study

Read Hacker News
Experiment with new technologies
Take courses to learn new skills
Read books to expand my knowledge
Conduct research on emerging technologies

Comments

Monday vhandit #2

Introduction to OpenLDAP directory service "A directory is a specialized database specially designed for searching and browsing, in addition to supporting basic lookup and update functions" A directory service can be local, providing a restricted context; or global, providing service to a much broader context. Curlie is a good example of a directory service. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a protocol for accessing directory services , specifically X.500-based directory services. OpenLDAP is an open-source implementation of LDAP. Writing system software: code comments I have read Clean Code (by Uncle Bob) and I thought that I should void comments since the code it explains its implementation itself. That is right but not always true. In this post, the author categorized the comments into 9 types. Only "trivial comments" and "backup comments" are the ones that should be avoided. I myself agree with "writing good comments is harder tha...

Git Feature Branch Workflow

Motivator It's important for a team to have an agreement on how the changes of source code should be applied. According to projects and teams size, we will define a workflow or select one from recommended workflows ; the "Feature Branch Workflow" is a candidate. What is it? - One branch "master" for main codebase - Several separated branches for features development Why should we care? - Be super simple and allow each developer works on a particular feature. - A stable codebase (master) benefits for continuous integration (CI) environment - Leverage "Pull request" for Code review How it works? A lifecyle of a feature branch (usually created by a story) 1. Creator creates a new branch from a story. For example: "ABC-1-setup-projects" 2. Creator checkouts the created branch and works on the branch (commits, pushes) 3. Creator has done the feature, he uses "pull request" to merge his branch into branch "master...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly". Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

My must-have apps for daily work

There is no doubt that cool apps can help us be more productive and enjoyable at work. For the time being, I really love the following apps which are used by me almost every day. 1. A personal Kanban In fact, a personal kanban is the most useful app for me. Why does it matter? It is not just a to-do list, but it keeps me motivated every day because it helps me be able to know what my "big picture" is. I usually set up my plans together with a path to reach them. KanbanFlow is my preferred tool. KanbanFlow 2. A terminal Needless to say, a terminal is a must-have app for every developer, especially the ones use macOS/Linux. Due to its importance, I love to decorate and enhance it to be super exciting with various tools such as iTerm , oh-my- zsh , and thefuck . ;) iTerm + oh-my-zsh 3. A documentation "ecosystem" As a developer, I can not remember all things that I have experimented a day. Moreover, a document is really useful for sharing an...

Managing JAR files with Apache Maven

Apache Maven (Maven) is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information. Why Maven? Let’s learn about the Maven’s history here https://maven.apache.org/background/history-of-maven.html to understand why Maven is created. There are a lot of useful things that we should use Maven. In my opinion, the most important thing is that Maven solves the problems with managing jar files. It centralizes these files in one place and it is easy to use by declaring dependencies in a xml file (pom.xml). Using Maven to manage JAR files Firstly, I would like to give you an example about using some JAR files without Maven. In my project, I need some JAR files such as SNMP4J.jar, jta26.jar, jgraphx.jar, etc… so I had to search them on the Internet with visiting a lot of websites, download and add these files into my proje...

vhandit

Search This Blog