Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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management•

What are your engineering culture values?

Perform an activity frequently enough, and you will start to see patterns. After being involved in the process of creating software for two decades, I’ve decided to curate a living document of the high level patterns which are most applicable for how to build and maintain software well. These are my engineering culture values, what are yours? 01. Tradeoff Everything is a tradeoff. When you make a decision, you’re choosing where you sit between two extremes. It’s a useful thought exercise to consider what those two extremes are first to calibrate your options. Many times there is no correct answer,...

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Hiring advice for bootcamp graduates
essays•

Hiring advice for bootcamp graduates

I'm currently trying to hire as many software engineers as I can, and more and more I'm seeing applications from candidates who retrained via an intense, engineering bootcamp. I want to hire every single one of them. In general whenever I'm interviewing someone I want them to succeed regardless, but there's a lack of diversity of thought in tech and when I see someone with a background in marketing, customer support, or even a short order cook, I get excited about what they could teach me. Anecdotally, I see the tech enthusiastic clique who started coding when they were a...

9 min readRead more →
management•

Manager README 2021

It has been a while since I wrote my first manager README. The idea is simple: help people who are going to be reporting to you understand the way you think, what you believe, and what you expect. For this one, I'm going to write it without looking at my previous attempt to see how my worldview has changed in the intervening three years. Team The primary responsibility of an engineering manager is to be accountable for the engineering delivery of the team. That output must be high quality, timely, and delivered in a way that is sustainable. This is...

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Corporate values as memes
essays•

Corporate values as memes

This is perhaps only my second, and hopefully final, time where I play futurist. I'm going to argue that memes are the future of corporate values. You know, those pithy, untruthful, and ignored statements that the senior leadership of your company claim defines their identity and culture. I want to replace them with the inane nonsense that you see across imgur, 9-gag, and icanhascheezburger. I'll show that this brave new world of corporate values as memes has clear benefits and should be embraced by providing real examples of how this amazing future could look. But first lets take a brief...

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fitness•

Ready to start

Thank you for joining me on this journey of learning the how and why of becoming fit, specifically concentrating on strength training. We learned that strength training is the basis for life-long fitness that will amplify your other fitness pursuits beyond strength. Fitness brings improved health, resilience, and confidence in yourself. It will reward you as you grow older by making your life easier and more enjoyable. You learned that it's a demanding prospect that will require you to re-evaluate your priorities and make time for training that you may not immediately have. It will be worth it. You learned...

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fitness•

Plateau

The introduction to why getting strong is hard began with the idea that the beginning of the journey toward strength is easy. No matter what you do, you will almost certainly get good results, which leads to internalising incorrect conclusions. You only get to be a novice once. By the time you become an intermediate lifter you will experience many occasions where the rule determining your progression is unmet. For example, say you need to lift a certain weight successfully 10 times in a set to raise the amount you lift next time by 5%. Your progressive training will come...

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