Posts on Engineering Management
- 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. Around this time, someone asked me if (as a manager) I found peer feedback useful. While my answer is 100% yes, I have some thoughts on why that is, what makes feedback particularly useful, how I like to use it as a manager, and ways in which it can be less helpful.
2024-02-26 00:03 +0000
- 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
- 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”. Is it the most important thing? No, the most important things are doing an excellent job and being a positive part of your team, but right after those I would say is “making sure people are aware of the work you are doing”. I get quite a bit of push back on this idea, with comments such as:
2023-09-25 00:10 +0000
- Rewards are a message
- Do as little work as you can
- You need a test environment
- The inevitable result of focusing only on shipping features
- A Defensive Approach to Engineering Quality
- A Learning Organization
- Celebrating the 'Craft' in our Engineering work
Photography Content
- Order fulfillment with Azure Functions and Stripe
In the previous articles in this series, I covered how I added photo galleries to my site, and then how I enabled a feature to buy the original digital photo. The last piece (for now at least) is how I automate delivery of those high-resolution images, so that everything should just happen without any manual steps. There might be a better way to handle this, but after reading even more pages on Stripe Docs, I decided to create a system using three Azure Functions.
2024-05-05 19:38 +0000
- Adding some e-commerce to my galleries
This is a follow-up to my last post on creating a photo gallery feature for my site, so it might be worth a quick skim if you haven’t read it before.
What if I wanted to integrate with Stripe to let people buy these photos? I don’t really need to make money from this hobby, but I’ve had a few people comment that various images would make great wall art, and I’ve wanted to try coding against Stripe’s APIs for real, so… here goes.
2024-05-05 01:47 +0000
- Adding photo galleries to my site
I mostly talk about work on this site, but I do have other interests! While I do a few different things, I have one main hobby, and that’s photography. I take courses in it, I spend too much money on it, I travel places with photos in mind, and I’ve ended up with 100s of photos that I really like. So, for years I’ve wanted to post these pictures online (beyond just Instagram) but creating an online photo gallery that I’d be happy with is a bit of work.
2024-04-13 17:02 +0000
Other Featured Posts
- Adding Bluesky likes to my Hugo based blog posts
- Adding llms.txt & markdown output to your Hugo site
- Homegrown Analytics
- Visual Regression Testing using Playwright and GitHub Actions
- Adding prefetch and prerender using the Speculation Rules API
- You probably don't need nofollow
- Updating my blog to support multiple image formats
- Assessing your site for Accessibility
- Assessing your site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Why you should care about the performance of your site
- Beer Tourism
Even More Posts!
See all my past blog posts