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A theme for productivity at work

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.

Journal: This Month I Learned (2023-April)

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...

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 Conduc...

Books Read in 2022

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 ...

My 2022 Review

2022 was completely a mind-blowing year for me. Lots of changes happened at work. At present, things seem to be going to settle down, I want to look back at my year. My balcony (2022) Q1 At beginning of the year, I started with Metaverse and NFT research. I completed my first course about a new technology Blockchain on brilliant[dot]com which became my best favorite learning platform later on. Getting a certified IBM developer certification was also a good experience. I gained more knowledge of technologies including containerization, microservices, DevOps, and Cloud-Native. It triggered me to plan for DevOps toolchain enhancement for the company. Adopting GitOps practice was a good start. It is one of my main focuses for my position role as a Tech Lead. I was really impressed by the book “The Brief History of Time”. The story of Stephen Hawking was so inspiring. To me, it was one of my favorite books of this year. Sadly, this period was the time when some of my good friends were leavi...

Journal: This Month I Learned (2022-Nov)

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...

Projects Ownership

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 ...