organization
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🔀 The division between group and personal workflow
When thinking about developer workflows, tools, and resources, dividing them into two categories proves useful: personal and group. A group resource is something that multiple people use (or should use): SDKs, libraries, linters, formatters…
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🍄 Mushroom Management
I recall a quote from the book The Soul of a New Machine that describes “Mushroom Management” and goes something like this: “Keep them in the dark, feed them sh**, and watch them grow.” (This book chronicles the experiences of a computer …
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🔄 Three levels of workflow
There are three levels of workflow: Personal (what you do to get things done) Department/Discipline (How multiple people who do the same thing get things done – Example: PCB design) Cross-functional (How people who do different jobs intera…
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📈 Scale vs. Value
As scale increases (# of people, # of technologies, # of products, # of teams, life cycle of product, experience, amount of knowledge, etc.), what does the value produced look like? Metcalfe’s law states that the financial value or influen…
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🔓 You should not be needed
An effective process, team, or organization should be able to continue on if any individual steps away for a bit, or forever. But, most people are insecure and like to be needed, so subconsciously structure things to require them to be pres…
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🔄 Open loops -> technical debt
If something is corrected, it needs to be fed back and incorporated, so you don’t keep redoing the same stuff over and over and eventually bury yourself in technical debt. Effective organizations close the loop.
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🔍 How to get the little things done?
Previously, we discussed habits. Habits are the way we get the small, but important, things done. Some people are naturally neat, organized, and focused – I’m not. Stuff tends to pile up in my workspace and I don’t even notice it. One thing…
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📌 Where do you put stuff?
There are a lot of ways to organize product development information. You could do something like: productA firmware hardware yocto-build docs manufacturing productB firmware hardware yocto-build docs manufacturing The above is nice …