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The Startup Culture
Working as a startup is fun. It’s an ecosystem of bubbling hope one minute, deepest despair the next. You pivot so often you feel dizzy. The lead time between decision and result is breathtaking in its brevity. You see impact straight away. Love autonomy? Then startup land is for you.
But here’s the funny thing. I’ve experienced from working in, and have being witness to, many less than ideal (some plainly toxic) cultures in startups. Minimal collaboration, minimal testing and minimal transparency. Why is that? Surely with a small company it should be easier to do? As I see it, as a startup, you are in a unique position to build a culture that is different to those you see in many large enterprise organisations. One that for example, encourages autonomy, mastery and purpose. Or one that builds quality in without resorting to heavy restrictive processes. So why with a small company, with no more than ten people am I seeing similar patterns of behaviour that classify as anti-patterns in any other business structure?
Why is it, that many startups appear to be slimmed down replicants of the exact culture they are trying to move away from?
I believe that companies don’t explicitly set out to mimic these companies, but rather they obliviously evolve into one through trade off and prioritisation.
Tradeoffs Impact Culture
Startup land is all about tradeoff and prioritisation. Why? Because we’re resource poor. We simply don’t have the bandwidth to roll out all[…]
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
What is gRPC?
gRPC - is a modern Remote Procedure Call framework created and popularized by Google but now is under CNCF license.
The main idea of the framework is to provide for clients, written in various languages, a possibility to execute remote calls to the server as if it is a local call.
Picture from grpc.io docs
The core concept of gRPC is that all communication between server and client is based on Protocol Buffers defined in proto files. The server will implement and support this interface, and the client will generate and use stub code.
More about gRPC and concepts - here.
Introducing: Greeter service
gRPC service example is taken from the official akka-grpc guide.
server-grpc-example repository contains a proto file with a service definition and its implementation. You can execute it on a local machine by running:
$ sbt runMain io.grpc.examples.helloworld.GreeterClient
By default, the server will start at localhost:8080.
Protobuf definition for the service is the following:
syntax = "proto3";
import "google/protobuf/timestamp.proto";
option java_multiple_files = true;
option java_package = "example.myapp.example.myapp.helloworld.grpc";
option java_outer_classname = "HelloWorldProto";
service GreeterService {
rpc SayHello(HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply) {}
rpc ItKeepsTalking(stream HelloRequest) returns (HelloReply) {}
rpc ItKeepsReplying(HelloRequest) returns (stream HelloReply) {}
rpc StreamHellos(stream HelloRequest) returns (stream HelloReply) {}
}
message HelloRequest {
string name = 1;
}
message HelloReply {
string message = 1;
google.protobuf.Timestamp timestamp = 2;
}
As you can see, Greeter Service has four methods:
SayHello() method for unary calls: a client sends a single[…]
It’s a sort-of-sunny day in the Pacific northwest, and I have the day off from work (which probably means I’m cleaning the garage today. Here are some links to ponder from my recent browser history. Camille Fournier posted a wonderful (and incomplete) list of skills senior engineers need, beyond codingLisi Hocke wrote a wonderful brain dump of her testing journey in a letter to her future self – that I think includes some of the feelings a lot of us have had over the past yearI don’t know if I knew about Elpha before this week, but there’s a great post from Isral Asanea on Engineering Management PrinciplesI just found the Doordash engineering blog this week, and this article on how they use Machine Learning is quite goodBetween direct reports, skip level employees, and peers, I do ~15-20 1:1s a week. I came across this article on what to do when a 1:1 becomes a vent, and it had some good tips I haven’t thought of before. See y’all next week.
11.06.2021 | 11:43 קרא עוד...
Just for fun, I was recently reading about queuing theory (that’s a normal thing people do for fun right?). One of the things that you need to think about in queuing theory is scheduling policy. There are a number of different way that you can pick which object in the queue goes next. One scheduling policy that intuitively makes sense to me in the first-in, first-out policy. Basically, you would pick the thing that has been in the queue the longest as the one that goes next.
But you can also choose to use a last-in, first-out policy. That doesn’t seem very fair to me. Think about waiting in a queue at the grocery store. You’ve been in line for a while, and someone else comes along and stands behind you in line, but when the next chashier is ready, they help the person who joined the line after you. The last one to join the line is the first one out. Why would you ever choose this scheduling policy?
Well, since I was just reading this for fun, I didn’t bother myself about it too much, but then a couple of days later it hit me that we often use a variation of this policy in the way we manage our backlogs. Things that have been recently added to the backlog are more likely to be worked on than things that have been there for a long time.
Why is that?
One reason for it might be availability bias.[…]
Most often when an internal email from a CEO makes it out onto social media it is a sign of a company in turmoil. Today however I want to take the time to give a shout out to our CEO, Richard Parker for an email and blog post about our company values that he shared with us yesterday. I feel that his words are incredibly powerful so, with his permission, I would like to share them with you today:
Subject: I’m proud of you.
It’s National Pride Month.
I’ve written a piece about it here, because it’s a topic I care about. I’ve also taken the small step of changing our website logo.
Diversity has been objectified over the years. Probably because it brings attention to inequality, and rightly so. But I hope that each of you, in whatever way matters most to you, recognise that, to me, you’re more than your ‘skill’.
Whether you realise it or not you’ve all been hand-picked because we liked you. For everything you have brought to the table and for everything you have, and will, go on to achieve here.
It’s entirely up to you whether you wish to join our temporary rebrand to show support externally, nobody will judge you either way. And I want to be clear: you don’t have to sport the rainbow colours to be supportive (support doesn’t have to be overt!). But should you wish to, you may use the logo below to update your signature (please don’t alter our logo in[…]
A friend recently asked for some advice in writing her CV (résumé) and suggested I turn what I told her into a blog post, so here it is. I don’t claim to be an expert in CV writing; these are just the ramblings of some random bloke on the internet. I hope you find them useful. Given that the fact you’re writing a CV means you’re likely to be looking for a job, I hope that you find a job you like, and the stress and disappointment along the way aren’t too bad.
CV means course of life. You’re trying to bring out the bits of this course that best meet the needs of the reader, like this photo of the course of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon brings out some things (such as the wiggliness) and leaves out others (such as the height).Credit: http://www.terraprints.com, CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
First step – think about the purpose
I know that this might seem like making a mountain out of a molehill, but I think it’s worth taking a moment to think about why you’re doing this and what you’re hoping to achieve. For this article, I’m assuming that the purpose of the CV is to persuade someone to give you an interview for a particular job. I’m explicitly missing out at least two possibilities:
Your CV is going to be crunched by a program rather than read by a human.You are applying to somewhere that has[…]
These rules have nothing to do with any methodology (except maybe complexity thinking, because human.) I have found it useful to bear these in mind while I coach. I’ve passed them on in various forms to people who are learning how to be better leaders, and suggest that leaders pass them on too. These are contextual, which means… well, they’re not actually rules. They’re heuristics or guidelines; there are situations in which you’ll want to do something different. Having said that, they’re applicable in a lot of contexts, and they seem to be things that are easy to forget when we get stressed or low on energy. So I call them rules because that seems to help them stick in my head better and make them my default responses to situations where context doesn’t suggest anything better. And a fair few have said that they found them useful, so… here they are. 5. Say Thank You. This used to be “Make thank you your default response to feedback”. Sometimes when people give us information, it’s hard to hear. By making “Thank you” your default response, you can take time to decide how you feel about what you’re being told; whether you need to respond in a different way; and what you can learn from it. We also don’t say “Thank you” enough. I spend a lot of time ranting at the TV, watching a film or a series in which one character does the other a favour, letting them know[…]
11.06.2021 | 5:35 קרא עוד...
This is a series of blogs posts tagged quality hack. Quality Hack is a phrase I’ve coined to emphasise the importance of focusing on delivering “good enough” software, and embracing the cult of imperfection. If you wish to contribute a post, contact me either on twitter, by comment below, or email me@annemariecharrett.com
Recovering Perfectionist
I’m a recovering perfectionist. For instance, it took me an hour to think and rewrite that first sentence. Why recovering? I’m a perfectionist and I’m aware that this isn’t always healthy. For me, perfectionism is less about ‘being perfect’ and more about ‘being in control’. Its my attempt to make everything work out the way I want.
And while perfection can help us achieve a great deal and complete work we are proud of, it can come at a great cost.
Aiming for perfection is not great for anyone’s mental health. I’m my own worst critic and an expert at identifying how I screwed up on this or that. Focusing on what is not, rather than what could be.
Perfectionism can be poison in relationships too. With high and unreasonable expectations comes inevitable fall out creating distance between those you love.
Work wise it can be a problem too. A perfectionist doesn’t stop at good enough leading to stress, high anxiety and burnout.
There’s benefits to being a perfectionist. It helps me achieve my goals, giving me clarity. It encourages me to continue, even when the outlook is grim.
As a recovering perfectionist I know I[…]
למדו מתי להשתמש באוטומציה ומתי לא "למדו מתי להשתמש באוטומציה ומתי לא" – תחילה – חשוב ללמוד כי למרות ההבטחות של כמה ממשווקי הכלים אין אוטומציה ללא תכנות, בסופו של דבר עם כל ההקלות שחלק מן…
(How to Survive the Coming Test Automation Zombie Apocalypse (PDF slide deck By Dale Emery bit.ly/15XFGkp סט שקופיות מעולה המתאר את מרבית המחלות התוקפות פעילויות אוטומציה - ומדגיש כיצד לטפל בהן! על כל שקופית ניתן לפתוח…
