Recent blog posts from sallylait.com
In my career I’ve seen a wide range of what could generically be considered “challenging times”: layoffs, a pandemic, complete C-suite overhauls, political instability and wars, reorgs and strategic U-turns, and more. As a manager and leader, one of the most difficult things to do can be supporting a team of others through a tough challenge, whilst you’re also processing and being affected by it…
Another year has come to an end, and I’m back with my lengthy annual reflections. This was a more challenging year in many ways, and whilst I’d never have chosen the low points, I do have optimism for where I’ve got to for 2026. ℹ️ Note that this is (intentionally) being posted incredibly late and reads as a bit disjointed after being sat at 90% since the end of the year, and finally posted in…
After the first iteration at LeadDev last year, I was thrilled to be invited back as one of the co-facilitators of the "Connecting Leaders with Disabilities" community representation group (CRG) at this year's LDX3 event. The idea of the CRGs is pretty simple - dedicated space is created as part of the event for different communities to come together. They’re intended as relaxed drop-in…
This chain letter-esque post has been doing the rounds, and in the spirit of trying to rebuild my blogging muscle I thought what better to blog about than blogging? This post is a bit of a love letter to having your own place on the web, no matter how simple. Why did you start blogging in the first place? When I first started answering this, my brain jumped to my first ‘proper’ blog, which I…
A hugely belated ‘end of year’ post, but it’s here finally! 2024 was a game of two halves (well, 3 and 1 quarters). If it hadn’t ended with the single worst period of my life, this would have been a pretty good year. I managed a lot more travel than before, something that’s always a highlight for me and which creates lasting memories. Unbroken night sleep mostly settled down, I felt very settled…
Despite growing up as a third culture kid used to travel, and having spent almost 20 years visiting various places around Japan, this spring brought a new experience: taking my kid on their first international holiday. I’ve written this post for friends considering a Japan trip, as well as for future me to look back on. We went primarily as a special trip with my Mum, so stuck to loads of…
My annual, lengthy, round-up tradition continues into another year. 2023 brought a return to Japan, a return to work, a lot of fatigue and health challenges to navigate, but also a lot of lovely memories. This post is part of a yearly series dating back to 2011(!), of which the previous post can be found here. Overview Before I dive in, I haven’t been on social media nearly as much this year,…
My job hunt experience this time around was very different to previous rounds. Being the day-to-day carer for a baby under a year old, I knew that juggling the two commitments would be tricky, but I hadn’t quite expected all of the ways that it turned out to be, especially around power dynamics. This isn’t a topic I’ve seen talked about a lot, yet it’s something I’ve been asked about quite a few…
During my latest job search, I’ve found myself wishing I’d kept more detailed notes on situations encountered in previous roles. It’s led me to put together something I’m calling my ‘Tell me about a time’ document. I’ve been interviewing with a small number of companies lately, trying to see if I can find a role that better fits what I want from my life and career going forward now that I have a…
It’s time for another annual roundup, but this one’s been a notably very different year. Here’s some of the memorable bits… fashionably late this time around! The big one… having a baby I should probably start here! This has unsurprisingly been the main event that shaped the year. But before I jump in, I wrote about my thoughts on child-related sharing here, which hopefully gives a bit of context…
I was recently invited to be on Skiller Whale's Primarily Context-Based podcast to talk about the topic of how technology can influence business decisions. This is a big and nuanced topic, and as we only managed to cover a small slither of it in the original discussion I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in a long-form blog post form as well as whatever ends up making it into the show.
I’m not going to bury the lede… I’m making some life changes and am looking for a new role in 2023, and I’d love your help to find it! I’ve been on maternity leave since earlier this year, which has been the longest time I’ve been out of the tech bubble day-to-day since my career started. In between the chaos and sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn it’s also been a chance for me to spend a…
After a very long, pandemic-tastic gap, I’m back with an update on my Japanese learning adventures. For those of you following along, I’ve got a part one and part two ready for your reading enjoyment, should you wish to get the full “previously on…” experience. But as a quick summary, I originally started to ‘learn’ Japanese back in 2008 for a trip, then in 2017 many more trips later I started…
According to the dConstruct archive, the previous iteration of the conference was in 2015. 2015! My digital footprint tells me that I wasn't able to make it as I was speaking at a small web event in some Kentish woods, and so my last attendance was in 2014, a year that I remember vividly for the content being exceedingly post-apocalyptic and even more brain-melting than usual. Poor, sweet, naive…
Earlier this year I had a big life moment: I had a child. As with all big life moments it’s come with a lot of introspection for me, and one of the things that I pondered a lot and felt most strongly about was around how much or little to post online about them; how much of a trail of their life I’d be creating for them to inherit in the future.
A recent tweet by Will Larson around developer productivity surveys caught my eye, as this is an area I find really interesting. Despite my interest, it hadn’t really clicked for me that this was a topic people don’t seem to write about too much. I thought I’d share out some of what my current engineering org at Farewill has been doing over the last year, in the hope that it may spark some…
When it comes to career advice, a common recommendation is you’ll need to work on your leadership to become more senior. In previous times “leadership skills” may have been code for “become a manager”, but nowadays even in hands-on/individual contributor roles leadership skills are becoming increasingly sought after. People are encouraged to know their leadership style, name and share it with…
Another pandemic-tactic yearly round-up! As a reminder, I like to look back at the end of the year, write myself a reflection on how I’d found it, and curate some memories for future me. This is the 2021 edition. But before I start, a little aside is that I realised earlier I’ve been writing these for ten years now! Here’s the 2011 into 2012 post if you’re interested, which seems to be the first…
Earlier today I saw a tweet from Jo Franchetti, asking what advice you'd give your junior developer self. It's a classic question and one that's ripe for a blog post, so here's my take. Hey Sally, You may have got into this web development malarkey because you liked having a way to put your emo photos and thoughts on your own slice of the web, but I’m here from the future to share some hard…
One of the hardest things about being in a leadership position is understanding that you’re so visible, and your actions or behaviour — whether intentional or not — can send ripples through a large sphere of influence. In this post I want to give some tips about how to handle times when you’re not in a good place, balancing taking care of yourself with your leadership responsibilities. I vividly…
When it comes to looking after ourselves, sometimes we need to make sure we're practicing self care at the appropriate level. I was recently asked a couple of things which flipped a bit of a switch in my mind. 1️⃣ “What do you do for self care?" 2️⃣ “Do you have anyone else for support?" Now, these aren’t new questions. I’ve been asked them at various points before, and as…
I’ve written some form of annual summary most years since 2011, and every year I read them back. They act as a reminder of the good and bad, and help me see the threads in my life. 2020’s a tough one to write, and has turned out to be a bit of a monster post. Looking back, 2020 has been the hardest year of my life, and may well have been even without a pandemic.
I’ve been involved in a couple of progression frameworks. In my last role I led a group where we redeveloped the Engineering framework, and now in my new role I’m building on some already great work done to help get our first Engineering version done, before I kick off our Enginering Manager framework in December. From both processes I’ve learnt a lot about dos and don’ts. In the rest of this post…
Starting a new management relationship can be a turbulent time on both sides, and we want to do our best to minimise disruption as much as possible. In this post I'll talk through some steps to help smooth over the process. Whether through someone joining a company and meeting their manager for the first time, or moving manager for other reasons, this period can be full of mixed emotions. Central…
During my search for a new role, I kept a list of questions to use during the process. In case they're useful to me in the future (or anyone else for that matter!), I wanted to write a post with the key ones. The questions that I ask tend to be split into a few key areas: about the role and what people expect, about the company more broadly, the culture, and then practical specifics.
“What should I learn? Technology moves so fast! There’s so many options! How will I ever get through everything?” In the coaching calls I’ve been doing recently it’s been interesting to see some themes come up multiple times. One of those topics is people who’re struggling with feeling like there’s too much they need to learn or improve, and not knowing where to start. A few examples: Someone who…
As you may have seen from a few mentions, I'm soon going to be starting a new role. I’m very happy and excited to say that from October I’ll be working as Head of Engineering at Farewill! 🎉 2020 continues to be a year of shifting plans, and adapting when needed or when opportunities arise. Despite working with some absolutely fantastic people and really believing in the mission at Monzo, when the…
Throughout September I’m going to be holding some free coaching sessions aimed at supporting folks from groups that are under-represented in the tech industry. Here’s a bit more about what that looks like and how it’ll work. 📣 Update: I’ve closed the form for now as I’ve had quite a bit of interest and want to get these folks booked in first. If possible I’ll re-open afterwards…
When you think about “scaling” in the context of engineering, does your mind jump to thinking about systems, or about growing your organisation? Or maybe both! These are topics that have had a lot written about them, but what I’d like to talk about in this post is from the perspective of you as an individual: how to scale yourself as a manager. Everyone’s situation will vary in different degrees…
In this post I talk about flipping around a common management tactic – the PIP – to help people move through periods where they’re feeling unhappy at work PIPs, or Performance Improvement Plans, are a topic that come up frequently when talking about managing people. Some people swear by them, others less so. In a nutshell, the idea is that if an employee’s underperforming, they work with…
I’ve recently had conversations with some engineers who want to know more about what my day-to-day looks like, and what my path has been to get here. I thought I’d write a post in case it’s useful to others. If you want to get a good general understanding of what different roles entail at different levels (outside of my individual journey, which isn’t necessarily typical!) the best book I’ve read…
We’re collectively living through a very strange time at the moment. Sometimes it’s hard to answer the question “how are you?” honestly, because you don't actually know. To help break this down, I’ve put together a series of prompts that you may find useful, whether for asking yourself as an individual or used in a different capacity, like in 1:1s with reports. Getting a sense of how you are Very…
I’ve been reflecting on the last year and a bit of working back in engineering management, and have a few posts that I’d like to share. These are things that would have helped me to hear when I was starting out for the first time, so I’m writing particularly for people thinking about becoming a manager. The first one is about friendships and support as a manager. Returning to management was a…
Happy new year! It’s that time again - the Christmas break is drawing to a close, and I’ve got some headspace to look back on what the year has held. This year I’ve decided to split my annual reflections into two posts: one looking back over the last 12 months, and another over the decade. This is the first, and it covers rare infections, work, and more. As always I’m writing to document…
It's not often that I hear about an emerging web standard and I find my mind wandering back to it over the next few days, but Web Monetization has done just that. In this post I'll go through what it is, and why I think it's particularly interesting. Last weekend I was speaking at State of the Browser, where the always delightful (and impeccably dressed) Bruce Lawson was on before me.
Life as a manager means that I go to a lot of meetings. Over time it's very easy for them to get a bit unruly, and for your calendar to start managing you rather than the other way round. Every now and again I've found it's good to take stock, to tip everything out and start again, in the form of a calendar defrag. Here's how I approach it, and a tool you can use if you'd like to join me.
Since joining Monzo as an engineering manager at the start of December I've experienced a huge amount. In this post I wanted to capture some of what I've been up to, and what I'm looking forward to next. I got an email from an old client recently, asking (amongst other things!) “Is Monzo working out?". My reply was the same as it always is – I honestly couldn’t be happier with my work…
Since returning to employee status I've been thrown back into having an absolutely stacked calendar. Over the last couple of weeks I've been playing with an emoji-based system to help me work better. A lot of people have written a lot of things about ways to manage busy calendars, often using colour to help visually differentiate between types of tasks. Whilst I’ve found this useful, it…
This week I received the very happy news that I'd passed my second Japanese exam - the JLPT (otherwise known as 日本語能力試験) at level N4. In this post I'll outline my exam experiences and go through the resources I used. Since writing my first post on this subject, I’ve really enjoyed hearing from others who’d got in touch to let me know that they’d found it useful. Despite that post…
I really enjoy this time of year. Christmas is always a bit of a whirlwind due to numerous individual family gatherings and birthdays, but New Year is always a nice lull. As always I’m using a blog post as a prompt to look both back and ahead. My instagram top nine is an interesting take on my annual highlights! 2018 and health Let’s start with the rubbish stuff. This year was hard in a lot…
I’m so excited to announce that I’m soon going to be starting the next chapter in my professional life. I’m going back to employment, and joining Monzo on their mission to “build a bank with everyone, for everyone”. My role will be in Engineering Management, and I’ll be supporting the growth, progression, performance, and wellbeing of everyone I’ll be managing, even as they move onto different…
Most of the work that I do can be boiled down to trying to help people make better things with the web, in better ways. ‘Better’ is a nice vague term, isn’t it? In this case ‘better’ can mean things like faster, cheaper, or more effectively, but it can also mean cutting-edge, delightful, more ethical, or even simply happier. It’s a nice mix. I’ve spoken often about the importance of having a…
The other day I saw a call on social media from the lovely Jo Franchetti, asking for people’s views on web permissions to take into a W3C workshop. This is a subject that I think is really important. It’s a wonderful melting pot of technical aspects meeting user experience; of developer experience and browser capabilities merging with website creators’ visions. The web gaining ever-more…
Since the beginning of this year I've been taking my Japanese learning a lot more seriously. Having been asked about it by quite a few people, this post is intended to summarise my journey so far. My starting point(s) I first started to ‘learn’ Japanese in 2008 before my first trip, but that consisted of buying a phrasebook and copying a things into my omni-present notebook (these were…
This is the second post in a two-part series, capturing my latest trip over to Japan. You can find part one here, talking about more general aspects of the trip. In this post I'll be talking about the main reason for our visit - EVO. いっちょ！ARMS！ The Evolution Championship Series, or EVO for short is an esports, fighting game tournament series. This was the first time that it had come to Japan, and…
In January I headed back to Japan, jumping on the opportunity to spend more time in a country that I love. The trip was prompted by my husband competing at EVO Japan 2018, but ended up being so much more. In these two posts I'll talk about the trip in general, and the event itself. EVO Japan (an esports, fighting game tournament event within the EVO series) first came up last year, coincidentally…
Another end of a year means another time to look back, but also to look forward. As they usually do, 2017 has had both extreme highs and lows, as well as plenty in the middle. Life Let’s start with the important bit - life. My 2016 summary post talked about a shifting mentality to take a bit more control, and doing things that were important to me in both work and my personal life.
In this post I'll talk about the process I went through when starting to explore the strange and wonderful world of recurrent neural networks It all started with Dan Hon. You may know of Dan from his rather amusing posts, including “I trained an A.I. to generate British placenames”, “I trained an A.I. to generate ICD-10 codes”, English idioms, Ask MetaFilter, and more. On…
I wrote recently about how we’re working towards redesigning and redeveloping the OpenActive website (our redesign/development tender is currently open). As part of this we’re looking at people’s experiences of using open opportunity data, and how we can better support this by improving the data’s discoverability and usability. Please note that this article was previously written for the…
We’ve started the process of redesigning and redeveloping the OpenActive website, and as part of trying to do this openly we’d like to ask for your initial thoughts. Please note that this article was previously written for the OpenActive blog as part of my role on the project as an Open Data Institute Associate, and is recorded here for posterity. For anyone reading this who may be new to the…