As is the tradition for New Zealand based managers are coming back from a summer break I’m looking at all of my practices and thinking about where I might be able to do better this year. This year I’ve landed on more effective 1:1s. I’m a fan of LeadDev.com for topics like this and there are a wealth of resources about 1:1s there.

One video that I found particularly useful was a pancel discussion titled: Cracking the cadence of your software engineering 1:1s

The discussion is much more than just the scheduling (and every participant did something slightly different anyway)

• do your 1:1s weekly
• don’t skip, reschedule
• have a shared notes page to help ensure you’re both aligned on the takeaways and action items
• have a scorecard for yourself to assess the value and usefulness of your 1:1s
• some, maybe many people don’t want to do 1:1s, you need to show the value - do that by paying attention and following up outside 1:1s
• consider a non-regular schedule, especially if you have people you talk to who take more energy than others

Cal Newport’s Deep Questions podcast was a new subscription for me this year. Newport covers a bunch of topics around the theme of doing important work well and sustainably. The podcast is way less dry than you might imagine, largely due to Newport’s dad-joke heavy sense of humour.

I know diving into the latest ep of a podcast can sometimes feel like you’ve missed a trick, so for folks who are curious, this video on Newport’s views on they why and how of Slow Productivity is a pretty good intro to his subject matter.

Pat Kua’s End of Year Retrospective Template

Austin Kleon: Quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable)

What is a developer experience team?

The Coding Train fires up a vintage Apple ][ and sets about writing a simple version of Snake. All done with the standard BASIC environment: no special editors, no syntax highlighting, no Intellisense or Co-Pilot.

The DORA 2022 State of DevOps Report suggests loosely coupled architecture can predicts burnout in developers, which is the opposite to previous editions of the report. In the same report, a generative organisational culture is found to predict better performance related to security.

Dave Farley: Did Microservices Break DORA?

While we’re looking at State of… reports, the 2022 State of AI Report was also published recently. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but Jack Clark has a few notes.