Managing Engineers in less than 200 characters
Hire motivated people . Trust them. Set high standards for everything. Lead by example. Get out of their way and let them be the heroes of the day . That’s it. I’m @ketacode on Twitter.
Tal Bereznitskey
Latest posts
Zeit’s Now is amazing, but I can’t really use it :(
First, I’d like to say that now is one of the best innovations I’ve seen in deployment since the invention of node and npm. You spin up a working, HTTP/2, secured with TLS app with one command: now Then you can link your domain with another: now alias id mydomain.com That’s amazing! There’s zero configuration to do, zero forms to fill, zero friction in taking your app to production. I’ll probably…
Hacking your way to become a 10x developer, or even a 22x one
Is there really such a thing as a “10x developer”? You can check out the response to this question here: http://10x.engineer/ . On the other hand, I believe we can all be 10x more productive than what we do today, or even more than that. THE SECRET IS SIMPLE Coding involves a lot of “trial and error” cycles. If we can have 10 times more cycles, we will be a 10x developer. If this is true, we can…
Quality is too important to be left to QA engineers
TL;DR - Upgrade the careers of your QA engineers to Test Automation engineers (or better yet, become one). Happiness, Velocity and Quality will head your way. Two years ago, I fired all my QA engineers and re-hired them on the spot to be Test Automation engineers. This was an amazing change for them, being hired for a much more interesting and important position. Also, this set their career path…
Empowering employees using a simple technique
em·pow·er To equip or supply with an ability; enable: Everyone’s talking about empowering their employees . We all want people to spot problems, come up with solutions and complete tasks without or little guidance. Micro-managing isn’t something that works well in jobs that require creativity and using your brain to solve challenging tasks. I’m also a fan of equipping my team with more power. To…
To follow, or not to follow the hype, that is the question
Just read a conversation on Twitter starting with an observation about hype : I also have this struggle in my company. Should we continue with the simple thing that work? Or should we follow the current tech trends? I’d like to first start with a personal story from my previous workplace where we created security drivers for Windows. I can’t believe that’s what I spent my days back then, but when…
Features are Debt, not Assets
Building a product is a journey. Sometimes you build the right things, sometimes you don’t. You can usually categorize features into three two categories: Asset - It’s making the company money Neutral - It’s doing nothing Debt - It’s making the company spend money Neutral features doesn’t exist, here’s why . Keeping a feature in your product means you need to: Maintain its code Maintain its unit…
Unit tests Inception
I have no idea if Leonardo DiCaprio knows what unit tests are, or if he ever coded, but he did once hold the power of Inception . I need to plant an idea into the heads of my fellow developers. My mission is to change the mindset from “No one likes to unit test” to “Let’s unit test all the things!!!” . The only way to do this effectively is planting the idea that this will bring good to the team…
7 lessons Soccer taught me about management
There are so many things I learned from playing and watching soccer as a kid. I learned about geography and about all the countries and cities in Europe. I learned how to be a part of a team. How to never quit. How to be a part of a bigger cause. How to keep running when your body tells you to stop. It also taught me a lot about working with people and leading towards a shared goal: 1. The ball…
Open Source is the best Code Review
One of my colleagues was just about to start a new small project we needed to complete that is probably needed in a lot of companies. We just introduced better code reviews and I thought it would be great if this would be reviewed by a lot of people. So I asked: “Could we open source this?” I believe writing code you know will end up in front of the entire world really keeps you from cutting…
Less LESS is More
Did I mention that I’m in love with simplicity? Oh, it seems that I have . I won’t go into why simple is great again, this time I’ll just say that I’m also in love with speed . What can I say, I have a lot of love in me. I want my computer to load fast, have a blazing internet connection, my browser should popup quickly and websites should appear like magic without me waiting. That’s just the way…
Bad practice #1337: Newest feature wins
Just quickly ranting pointing out something I see over and over again. It happens in almost any company, on every product and on any platform. The bad practice is coined as “ Newest feature wins ”. This means that when a new feature gets into the system, it gets a lot more attention in the UI then it really deserves. It gets its own screen, notifications about it and accessibility from all over…
10 Lessons learned from being a VP R&D
When I was a kid, I was sure I was born to lead. I spent most of my days playing some sort of competitive sport. Either it was soccer, basketball, tennis table, karate or handball (Yeah, I played that too) - I felt like I knew how our team should play. I spoke up and lead on the playground. As I grew up, I lost that feeling. It seemed like other people knew much better than me what’s the…
"A bunch of idiots are paying me to learn new skills"
Whenever I’m asked what I do in my life - I tell them that “I work with computers”. Some people dig deeper and I say “I make apps and websites”. Some of them ask me what it’s like and I always reply “A bunch of idiots are paying me to learn new skills!” . Yes, I’m being payed to do something I would have done anyway on my own free time. This is…
Simple != Easy, so choose well
Rich Hickey, the author of Clojure, explains very well the difference between Simple and Easy. The most important thing to grasp is that: Easy is relative, Simple is absolute . Something that is easy for you, might be very difficult for me. Something that is simple , will be simple for the two of us. The second thing to notice are the antonyms: Easy <——> Difficult Simple…
What if sharing content was the other way around?
Today, we find interesting content to read by following our friends. Our Facebook friends and Twitter followers are sharing interesting content with the world. As part of this world we get to read content which is generally interesting. That’s a nice concept, but there’s a better way to find content. What if we could read content that was recommended directly for us ? So here’s…
Idea: Earn less money for writing more code
A quick one this time. We had a talk the other day at our office, where we pointed out that too much custom code is written. We got a lot of reusable components in our toolbox and writing yet another specific code isn’t such a great idea. Less code = Less code to maintain = Less bugs = WIN! We said that writing a lot of code is a sign we’re doing it wrong. We should strive for less…
4 Questions to ask before developing anything
Before I build anything, I ask myself these 4 questions: 1. Should I be working on this? Most feedback isn’t real. When you ask people for feedback, you’ll get false feedback. The only real feedback is from people who use what you’re building and care enough to tell you about it. If you’ll ask me for feedback about Gmail, I’ll find a lot of stuff to say. In my day to…
My job is to say no
I recently took the job of VP R&D at my company. Titles are nice, but the real job is to make the company successful. That was always my job, long before I was leading anything. In order to make the company successful in its mission, my job is to say no . I do so for two main reasons: fighting complexity and thinking long term. 1. Fighting Complexity Did I say I love simple things? Oh, it seems…
One Thing Apps
Continuing with my simplicity claims , I created an iOS app that does exactly one thing. And does it great. I’d love it if Apple would make a new category in the app store for “ One Thing Apps ”. I’ll tell you more about the app in the end of this post, but all of the interesting stuff is right up here. How do you spot that one thing to do? It’s quite simple.…