Month: November 2024

Head and the Heart

Head and the Heart

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Just finished Marianna Bellotti’s excellent Kill It with Fire (thanks Kate for the recommendation!) If you do any work with legacy systems, give it a read post haste. You’ll be equal parts informed and inspired.

This quote jumped out at me in particular:

Feedback loops are most effective when the operator feels the impact, rather than just hearing about it.

Amen and amen. Intellect is great, and willpower is helpful, but what fuels anything truly worth doing is emotion. It’s not an accident that a particular emotion tops my company’s list of guiding principles.

Lightning vs Lightning Bug

Lightning vs Lightning Bug

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For many organizations (mine included), November is performance review season. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I quite enjoy both getting and giving of constructive feedback. So much so that apparently I like writing about how I like performance reviews every November as well.

Today’s post is about specific questions for collecting feedback from stakeholders about a person you’re reviewing. Giving such feedback is uncomfortable for many people; it can feel like tattling or speaking ill of someone behind their back. But as a manager, my perspective is inherently limited (and usually biased). I require input from those who are working with my team day-to-day in order to fairly evaluate them and give them the feedback they need (both growth opportunities and especially praise they may not otherwise hear).

I’ve used a variety of approaches in the past, with mixed success. But I recently formulated a pair of questions in conversation with a career coach that I think can coax out the desired information without making stakeholders have too icky a feeling about giving it. They’re delightfully simple, and can be answered quickly and discreetly via BCC-ed email or even DM:

  • What do you appreciate about them?
  • What advice would you give them?

Question phrasing matters. I’ll be giving these ones a spin this year, we’ll see how it goes!

Spooky Season

Spooky Season

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I don’t know what’s scarier, that I saw this when trying to use airplane WiFi…

… or that I know the technologies to which it refers.

Honestly, sounds like how a D&D character might meet their untimely demise, does it not?

Be A Lumberjack

Be A Lumberjack

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Spent my morning debugging a data extraction pipeline that’s been failing to properly update a dashboard, despite it completing without error (lovely). Digging through the output of the pipeline software got me thinking about logging. There’s a real art to getting it right: too much is impossible to parse (and potentially leaks sensitive information), but too little is useless. Sometimes the difference between finding the source of the problem and not is having logs in a Goldilocks Zone.

In today’s case, the log looked something like this:

- Calling the API
- The API call succeeded

Better than nothing, at least it would have let me know if the API call was failing altogether. But this would have been so much more helpful:

- Calling the API with parameters X=a and Y=b
- The API call succeeded and returned N items

I updated the data pipeline to provide the above output, and will see how it runs tonight.

Details matter, y’all! I wish I knew a way to teach the above to software engineers, but I fear there’s no real way to learn except through the experience of having to do this sort of debugging. It’s not fun work, but it’s oh so valuable.