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

Make simple music program with beep(freq, duration) with Pascal

Pascal is my first programing language when I have studied in high school. It was really exciting for me. :) The Pascal programming language was created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970. It was named after Blaise Pascal, a famous French Mathematician. It was made as a language to teach programming and to be reliable and efficient. Pascal has since become more than just an academic language and is now used commercially . I tried to make a simple music program by using Lazarus IDE on MS Window 7, 64-bit. It frustrated me a few times how difficulty to use Sound command to make a sound. Sound did not work on my compiler and my platform anymore. So far, I just could use beep(freq, duration) from window unit to implement my work. Here is my code. ;) program mysong; uses Windows, crt; const C: Integer = 512; { x = A * EXP(LN(2)/12)} C_: Integer = 542; D: Integer = 574; D_: Integer = 608; E: Integer = 644; F: Integer = 682; F_: Integer = 723; G: Integer = ...

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

Installing NGINX on macOS

I have heard of a lot of NGINX recently. One of them was it can help for security issues; for sure, it much be more. It so happens that our team has got a ton of user stories from a security audit. It's time to delve into it. What is NGINX? In order to get a basic idea and have some fun , I've just picked some available posts from my favorite Vietnamese blogger communities as below: https://kipalog.com/posts/Cau-hinh-nginx-co-ban---Phan-1 https://viblo.asia/hoang.thi.tuan.dung/posts/ZabG912QGzY6 NGINX (pronounce: Engine-X) is a web server (comparing to IIS, Apache). It can be used as a reverse proxy ( this is what I need for security issues with configuration ), load balancer and more. How to get started? I found the below path for learning NGINX by googling "learn nginx": https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-online-resources-to-learn-Nginx In this post, I only went first step. This is installing NGINX on macOS and taking a first look at the confi...

How Would You Answer These Typical Interview Questions?

I have joined several job interviews with candidates at my current company. As a technical supporter, my attention was mainly focused on specific technical points rather than behavioral ones. However, I saw that these following typical questions were rarely missed for any interviews. In fact, there is a meaning behind of the questions. The concern is candidates should focus on answering the right things that interviewers really want to know. Take a look! Introduce about yourself It is "What and why are you fit for this job?". So, it is good to go "Talking too much about your hobbies."? I would say "We don't care about your hobbies much". ;) Why do you want to find a new job? It is "Why this job are interesting you?". So, it is good to go "Talking about something negative like 'I hate my boss/leader'"? I would say "Who wants to work with a negative person?" What did you do in your current j...

Sharing a virtualenv across several Python projects using Pipenv

There is a standard library for all projects in Python. However, several projects don’t always have the same dependencies all the time. That is where virtual environments come to play. You can follow this official document to use two separated tools virtualenv and pip to fulfill that need. My preferred alternative is to use pipenv . Pipenv is easy to use and convenient. The following are my steps to make a shared virtualenv for my all projects which requires the same dependencies. Step 1. Create an isolated virtualenv. python -m venv my-shared-env Step 2. Create a symbolic link to the created virtualenv. cd project_1 ln -s ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/my-shared-env .venv I have encountered the following issue at step 1. FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '{my_project_path}/.venv/bin/pip': '{my_project_path}/.venv/bin/pip' The root cause was I tried to create virtualenv by running pipenv install and renaming the generated virtualenv to ...

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