Duncan Mackenzie

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Posts on Engineering Management

  1. The Benefits of Peer Feedback
    It was just performance review season at my current job, so I spent a lot of time reading, writing, and talking about reviews.
    2024-02-26 00:03 +0000
  2. Finish what you started
    Software development projects can only have an impact if they make it to production, so instead of having forty partially done bits of work, you should always prioritize having something actually done.
    2023-10-19 14:51 +0000
  3. The importance of visibility to individuals, teams, and companies
    I’m often asked if I have any advice for other software engineers, and the absolute number one piece of guidance I give is “make sure your work is visible”.
    2023-09-25 00:10 +0000
  4. Rewards are a message
    I was a manager at Microsoft for about 18 years and for quite a bit of it I was a ‘manager of managers’, which means I often spent time working with my team on how to properly handle annual rewards.
    2023-09-19 00:40 +0000
  5. Do as little work as you can
    One of the keys to scalability in software systems is to reduce the amount of work you do per action.
    2021-05-07 04:04 +0000
  6. You need a test environment
    Depending on the size of your organization, you may be working in a world with anywhere from one (production) to many (staging, PPE, Dev) different environments, but often none of those are an accurate real-world test environment.
    2021-03-21 08:44 +0000
  7. The inevitable result of focusing only on shipping features
    Throughout my time leading engineers at Microsoft, there would often be discussions about the relative ‘velocity’ of our team over time.
    2021-03-14 23:44 +0000
  8. A Defensive Approach to Engineering Quality
    As an engineering manager, I have a certain amount of control over what ends up on our sites and in our systems.
    2021-01-25 01:15 +0000
  9. A Learning Organization
    A while ago, someone commented to me that their group was a ’learning organization’ and that was why they encouraged ongoing training, arranged bootcamps, lunch and learns etc.
    2020-09-14 01:28 +0000
  10. Celebrating the 'Craft' in our Engineering work
    Iterating towards quality is the real difference in a great engineering team
    2020-03-02 17:30 +0000

Other Featured Posts

  1. You probably don't need nofollow
  2. Updating my blog to support multiple image formats
  3. Assessing your site for Accessibility
  4. Assessing your site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  5. Why you should care about the performance of your site
  6. Space Games
  7. Drinking Craft Beer at the Brew Wild Pizza Bar in Madrid
  8. Beer Tourism

Even More Posts!

See all my past blog posts