Zhuk Notes (Page 2)

More issues

In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi sounds like a remarkable young lady - a child, really, who had to endure unimaginable things and take responsibilities of decisions which no child should have to take. This was a book worth reading. In addition to describing the tragic life of Yeonmi and her family, the story describes

Managing technical quality in a codebase

Will Larson wrote a thoughtful post about managing technical quality in a codebase. The post goes through seven different approaches to managing technical quality, starting from fixing the most critical thing in your code right there and then, to planning & executing an organization-wide quality program with program sponsors, metrics,

Time for reading and workouts

There's a new interesting blog/newsletter called The Observer Effect by Sriram Krishnan which has posted two interviews so far: Marc Andreessen and Daniel Ek. Both are fairly long, so be warned. A lot of themes are covered, but the topic of productivity and personal time management is

The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel

As software engineers, we are used to designing large system architectures by defining the roles and responsibilities of each component. We assess whether some components have overlapping responsibilities, are overburdened with too many responsibilities, or if there is a gap that must be filled with a new component. Defining, maintaining,

Why are CEOs failing software engineers

The idea that Taylorism isn’t the best fit for management in creative fields like software engineering isn’t new in any sense. However, rarely do you come across an article which lays down the historical roots of different management forms, their purpose & practices, and mapping between the types

Budget as a requirement for feature development

What is the most annoying thing you encounter as a professional software engineer? Back in the days when I was actively writing code, it was often missing the right context. Work would come in as a stream of tickets, often hastily written, each representing small pieces of work that would

Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

The book is based on a research of: - 23 000 survey responses - over 2 000 organizations, including startups, large enterprises, it/software and regulated industries - projects including greenfields and legacy code - methodologies from waterfall to agile/lean The research first shows that software delivery performance is

Who by Geoff Smart, Randy Street

Geoff Smart and Randy Street run ghSMART, a management consulting company which maintains a database of thousands of business executives and which is then used to analyze different aspects of what makes executives and businesses successful. They noticed that unsuccessful hires are one of the most expensive mistakes ever made,

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

The best management-related book I’ve read lately. Ben Horowitz is currently known as the cofounder and partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This book walks through Ben’s experience as a founder/CEO of his previous companies, Loudcloud and Opsware. Ben describes in a lot of

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Surgeon Atul Gawande offers a fascinating perspective on the use of checklists in medicine, aviation, and structural engineering. Drawing on real-world cases and a successful WHO study on safe surgery procedures, this book effectively argues for using checklists as a cost-efficient tool to reduce errors, enhance team communication, and transform