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Simplifying the To-Do List I have started to simplify how I manage tasks by using journaling as my tool. It's just one page, and all I need to do is write down what I need to do each day. This page will be archived weekly, and no personal kanban is needed anymore. I feel that this approach is sufficient for the job. Focus Mode I rarely get any notifications during the week. - I use macOS Focus Mode "Mindfulness" as my default. - I uninstall desktop apps that make noise, such as Slack, Outlook, Teams, and Messenger. Instead, I use the web in my browser. - I use Flow as my Pomodoro app. - I use macOS Shortcuts to define most of the tasks I do at work. Keeping in Mind... When I was too engaged in work, it was easy to get exhausted. There are two things that I should always keep in mind to avoid burnout: - Always save time for adapting to changes. - Do not expect too much from outsiders.

I learned that it's important to take breaks and practice self-care to avoid burnout. It's also important to communicate with colleagues and managers about workload and prioritize tasks accordingly. Finally, getting hands-on experience with different aspects of the business can be valuable for personal and professional growth. OKRs review The results of the OKR review should not directly impact performance appraisals. Key Results should be straightforward measurements of Objectives, not just a to-do list. They should also be related to daily work, rather than separate topics. There are two ways to review objectives: "Completion" or "Rating". The status should be balanced among objectives and used to adapt to current efforts. Member reassignment How to find a good fit between business and personnel growth: Salary costs increase year by year. It doesn't make sense to increase customer billing year by year. Burnout counter: Engagement I engage to work close...

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 Conduc...

My bookshelf Technical - Operating System: Three Easy Pieces. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. - The Effective Engineer. Edmond Lau. - English Grammar in Use. Raymond Murphy - Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering. Brooks Jr., Frederick P.  - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd edition). Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister. - A Philosophy of Software Design. John Ousterhout. - Modern Computer Architecture and Organization: Learn x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures and the design of smartphones, PCs, and cloud servers. Jim Ledin. Thought Provoking - Đúng Việc. Giản Tư Trung. - A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking. - Một đời như kẻ tìm đường. Phan Văn Trường. - Một đời thương thuyết. Phan Văn Trường. - Tinh hoa xử thế - Dám bị ghét. Kishimi Ichiro, Koga Fumitake. - Phép màu để vượt lên chính mình. Nhan Húc Quân. - Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship Through Woodcraft. Robert Baden-Powell. - Thay Đổi Cuộc Sống Với Nhân ...

This Month I Learned posts are aimed to share what I have learned during the month such as my thoughts, recommend resources, tips, how-to, and so on. Vung Tau beach Engineering Levels I conducted a lot of meetings with HRM to define the standards for evaluation criteria, career path ladder, Personal Appraisal (PA) processes, and onboarding/offboarding processes. I knew more about the expectation from an HRM perspective for engineering levels evaluation criteria. For example Define many enough titles for a long career path development Define general criteria for each level How to calculate score when evaluation with weight matrix applied Anticipate risks before executing a process Team Engineering Lead Organization I collected ideas from different people When having no dedicated leader, every member of the team has a fairly chance to practice leadership skills Scalability strategy: development teams’ size, and new position nomination. Security Awareness Training I conducted this sharing...

Developers should be informed transparently about the next things that they are going to do since it impacts their mentality as well as their accountabilities. A view of Vung Tau beach First thing first, the Product Owner plays a very important role in understanding the business of the projects clearly and planning the User Stories for Development Teams. For Development Teams, we have two roles related to a project including Owner and Maintainer. The following are the definition and responsibilities for each role: Project Owner The Owner is normally assigned to the team that created the project at the beginning. It is known as the long-term project of the team. Therefore, the members of the Owner have almost knowledge of the projects including the history (i.e decisions made), business logic, and technologies used.  - Maintain a good system design (code) of the projects. Therefore, they are mandatory to review code (pull requests) from other teams. - Maintain the related documents ...

Software development can be understood simply as a program to receive inputs (i.e customer needs) and then produce outputs (i.e working software). It is worth it to know how many steps are in that program. When something gets stuck in a step, everyone is aware of that. The first painting of my son The General Process Big Picture There are two main factors in this picture including the people with roles and their interactions. All people involved in developing the product know their responsibilities clearly and how to make things done right. Therefore, a good collaboration can be reached. Product Roadmap Contribution It would be great for developers to know what the next features to work on are as well as when those features will be delivered. Therefore, the product roadmap is very important. The items in the roadmap should be contributed by ALL people involved in the product. Because software engineers directly develop, test, delivery, and monitor the software, they should also contrib...

 Historically, our company ubitec had started with a customer project. Agile/Scrum was our proposal for working with customers. Time by time, Agile/Scrum also became our culture for software development. To be successful with this development approach, we somehow needed to have a fast release for customers (i.e. every one week). Back then, we had a build tool Jenkins which was responsible for having sprint release packages for our customers. The build job pipelines contain some steps such as gathering the artifacts, checking the code convention, running the tests, building docker images, and packaging an archived file (a zip file). The set of tools involved in a pipeline is roughly called a toolchain. It is just a part of a bigger process called the DevOps toolchain. Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-archive/2016/11/devops-architecture-available-on-bluemix-garage-method-site/ DevOps is a proven method that fits Agile. Today,  it is even treated as a mandatory factor...

As of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic still persists. In Vietnam, people have just passed a horrible time of lockdown, we needed to stay at home for nearly 4 months. I have even got covid infected and spent a quarantine time for more than three weeks. My balcony garden More books read This year, I read 22 books of various kinds. Reading books becomes my habit. English books Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't The Tao of Microservices Software Architecture for Developers: Volume 2 Vietnamese books Nhân tố Enzyme  Nếu biết trăm năm là hữu hạn Đạo giáo Tâm Thành và Lộc Đời Lịch sử tư tưởng Nhật Bản Totto-chan bên cửa sổ Thiền sư và em bé 5 tuổi Swiss Made Suối Nguồn Hạnh Phúc và May Mắn Một đời quản trị Con chó nhỏ mang giỏi hoa hồng Cách nuôi dạy những đứa trẻ dễ cáu giận, khó bảo Muôn kiếp nhân...

Chairs in my office Once I was chatting with my teammates... Me : "I wonder why it is always necessary to refer to this source, that source, has anyone done it, is there any research? While no problem is the same, no situation is the same. Why not use our own brains to create a whole new one? Why do we have to be the insiders to consult the outsiders? Isn't that very paradoxical?" My teammate : "I agree with your point that no two situations will be exactly the same and that there is no one size fits all. But there's one like this, I don't think it's all the problems we're dealing with that only we can meet. So of course, if I can find a source to refer to first, it's still better. Just like when implementing a software feature, not every problem is the same. But I still have to go check to see if I'm the only one I've met? Or if someone has met me, I have to see if their method suits me before I decide to try it, but I don't blindly ...

Agile is a fit for our company business. We use Scrum practices as our Agile framework. Eventually, Scrum is just a framework that helps us work together to develop, deliver, and maintain our products. Moreover, it is also a tool to grow the teams. By practicing Scrum long enough, we will gain the great following values: Commitment Focus Openness Respect Courage --- [1]. https://agilemanifesto.org [2]. https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

Fansipan mountain As a mentor, I always give to my new members the following practices as my advice for mindset at work. “A over B” means while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Solution   over Technology We should approach to solve the problems rather than depending on technologies. The technology limitation should not our excuse to reduce the quality of the feature. For example, we’re strong at React, but we are willing to learn a new framework Meteor due to customer needs. We are software engineers, we are good at problem-solving. Technologies are our toolbox. Contribution   over Complaint When we encounter and find pain-in-the-ass issues such as lacking documentation, old frameworks/libs, lacking testing, etc.. we try our best to resolve them! Refer to The Boy Scout Rule: “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” Collaboration   over Following Sometimes you even need to consult customers to bring great custom...

  1. Cha Voi: Dạy con nên người ở thời đại số Author: Trương Nguyện Thành Language: Vietnamese I love the methodology of parenting so-called Cha Voi (elephant father). It is neither very strict nor easy. The parents take themself as an example to lead their children. 2. Release it! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software Author: Michael T. Nygard Language: English It was fun to read stories about how the author investigate and solve the issues of software running on production. I learned lots of terms and strategies to ensure stable software such as health check, circuit breaker, logging, monitoring, etc, ... 3. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Author: Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Language: English When talking about algorithms, people usually think it is something complicated and also for computer science only. However, algorithms are actually steps to solve a problem. Life consists of lots of problems. We can use the power of algorith...

As a software engineer, I recently have heard of a lot of feedback from my colleagues and friends that they don’t see their career path or they don’t know how to move to the new levels in their company. No exception, I used to have that thinking before.  In my opinion, there is a very important reason why people are struggling to find the answer because “career path is not always the job titles”. Normally, each company has its own job titles such as junior-level developer, middle-level developer, senior-level developer, teach lead, software architect, CTO, etc. Hence, it is not true that a job title is reasonable for every company. The interview is often conducted hardly to find a candidate matching the company title. If we have a good enough job title standard, the interview would take place very easily, right? Therefore, I prefer to define my own career path through what skills are gained under a job title. But wait, why do I need a career path? To me, a career is an indispensabl...

  Introduction I write this user guide to help us (you and me) have a good collaboration at work. I hope you also share yours. How I view success We all feel passionate and happy at work. We all enjoy discussing transparently. We take it easy to give and receive feedback. After all, we together develop and bring valuable applications to users. How I communicate I mostly prefer a face-to-face conversation. Just leave me a message on Slack if you don't want to come to my desk. For a big topic which takes more than 30 minutes, we should have a meeting. Only send me emails only if stuff is very formal or out-of-office hours Things I do that may annoy you I do practice the Pomodoro technique so that sometimes you see me in the "do not disturb" mode. Often to make things clear, I am at ease talking   frankly   with you. What gains and loses my trust It is easy to gain my trust when you commit to what you say. You show your passion and endeavors to achieve that. It is easy to lo...

What are your motivations for creativity? - I want to make a change. - It makes me happy! It is a need of my mind. How to be creative for a thing? There are two steps: - See the thing as every people see it - Think about a new different thing from it How to think about a new different thing? There are two ways: - Forget all things you have already known. - A whack on the side of your head. ;) This was what I have learned from the following great book: source: Amazon.com Well! A physical whack on the side of your head is needed sometimes but the meaning behind is that you need to break these 9 following locks on your mind. Remove them! The lock #1: "The correct answer" We all learn from schools that there is only one correct answer to a question. For example, a proposition is only true or false in Algebra. In reality, there are always some answers to a question basing on a point of view. For example, number 6 becomes number 9 if you look it ...

Human resource management motivation Managing human today is quite different from the industrial age which treats people as just "chickens". Rather than people now are very important to the success of an organization. People are an organization's special resource. They should be encouraged to grow to contribute their effort and creativeness to their beloved working environment because the contribution is one of their most needs in life. Training people: getting rid of the ineffective model and adopting the new one The ineffective model of training people: Hiring new people --> giving them a crash course once --> expecting them working effectively.  That somehow makes sense but you're about to expect a luck because you do not really spend your effort for mentoring them. If they can work effectively, well...lucky you! Otherwise, you will blame that these people are ineffective and you let them go and hire the new ones. What a waste of time! The new effe...

Using daily meetings for frequent course corrections. However, you should keep the meeting short because time is burn rate . Though good collaboration doesn't guarantee a project's success, poor collaboration almost always guarantees a project's failure What benefits does the daily meeting bring to you? - Keeps inexperienced developers and experienced ones on-track. - Avoids reinventing the wheel. - Limits  tumbleweed developers ' damage. - Leverages the entire team’s experience to solve problems quickly. - Improves team communication. - Helps every people have a big-picture point of view. Who are tumbleweed developers? We’ve all worked with a few tumbleweed developers. These developers lose direction and drift through their days. They wade through the random code and “improve” it, cleaning up method signatures, polishing algorithms, and reformatting brackets. Tumbleweed developers lack the discipline to finish any task you ask them to do and generally c...

This is a book telling about many stories of the book's author, Ta Minh Tuan. Each his story is not only a valuable lesson but also a heart-to-heart talk. Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast I accidentally attended a $2 meetup which was held by Hoithao.vn in 2013. It was the first time for me to see the author. At that time, he wanted the attendees to repeat many times a sentence "Think big, start small, move fast" (a mindset for entrepreneurs). It was really impressed to me. I've been following him on Facebook since 2013. This book was his recommendation. Do It Anyway Your success is defined by yourself. It is built by your habits. Habits are the things need time to tackle. To me, that somehow means JUST following your heart combining with your brain because you're the one who knows what you're doing. Believe in yourself and never betray your dream! We Are One The author said that "everything is connected". This is also the ...

The topic is about my experience on my first project with my freelance team. We implement the last step of this process which you can find in the end of this post. You might have heard of something like the following: Many customers don't know what they want. Yes, that's a fact. In order to help customers solve their needs, we'd better consult them or we provide a consulting service. The next questions is "how?". Our approach is enhancing the collaboration with customers or providing a design of customer interactions. Firstly, we create a website wireframe to express the idea of website's functionalities. For example: Source: Wikipedia And, the further step is that we make a running app based on the created wireframe where the real UI/UX is demonstrated. However, it is just a GUI/frontend with dummy data without interaction to a backend. Technically, that is just a html template which contains source code of HTML, CSS and Javascript. For exampl...