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📚Staff+ on books

Today I want to share with you a list of the MUST READ books for the Senior+ grade. Yes, let's talk Senior+. Not everyone needs and will be a Staff+ engineer by title, but the knowledge from this books will help to get into the right mindset and master tools that will distinguish you as an expert.

1️⃣ Clean architecture by Robert C. Martin. This book was the one that taught me, that we write code to help business. Potentially, there shall be no line of code we produce that does not bring business closer to its purpose. This book is more about the application architecture than the workload architecture, but the principles that are explained there can be scaled.

2️⃣ Designing Data-Intensive Applications. For me, this book is an almanack about present technologies. Yes, before this book, I knew that there are relational databases, document databases, graph databases, etc. But I did not have everything sorted out clearly. This book goes over almost all the technologies that might be used during the design of distributed systems and explains them in detail. It will make you a much stronger specialist. Hard skills will flourish 📈.

3️⃣ Пиши, сокращай. Our work, to a high degree, consists of written communication. It's very important to be able to express your thoughts shortly and effectively, make them such, so they can be consumed quickly. This helps you convey your ideas and get information from others swiftly.

4️⃣ Leading Great Meetings. It was the book that made me confident, that I could create and facilitate any meeting. It explains what meetings are, what their purpose might be, and how to effectively achieve this purpose. Also, it provides a simple set of tools that you can use in meetings. It's a great start into the meetings facilitation topic.

5️⃣ Nonviolent Communication. Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoft demanded that top management read this book when he was appointed CEO in 2014. This book changes your mindset about communication and helps you create and maintain a healthy, non-toxic environment. The concept helps both at work and in your day-to-day life. I second Satya and would love more people to read or listed to the book.

These five books will definitely make you a better specialist. The one that is confident in their actions, the one that achieves results, the one that people want to work with and companies want to hire 😉

Please, share your favourite books in the comments. I'm looking forward to update my reading list.

🪨 Staff+ on being a bedrock

During the Technical Guidance Training, an internal training, which we have at SHARE NOW we ask people from the leadership positions to tell their leadership stories. It's an open form where people talk about the things they consider important. One person, the head of our tribe once shared their ⚡️ insight that I consider important: when you are in the leadership position, people look at how you behave.

Pfff, you may say. I look like anyone behaves, that's what our monkey-like species do! But hear me out. In any team, group, or party of people, we have leaders. Assigned or the ones who emerged themselves, but we have someone to look at and assess their behaviour. Staff+ are also leaders, your team and other people in engineering are watching you. This is your privilege and another tool that you can use to help ourselves and business.

How?

1️⃣ Be confident. Once, when I wasn't staff yet, I was pairing with a person who had just finished university and started to work for a big consulting agency here in Hamburg. We had a task to write some tests to solidify critical software migration. I took this as an opportunity to learn Java and overall, I thought, that I was learning more from this person than they from me.
Later, I got feedback from their supervisor that they are happy with my contribution to this task because my calm and steady approach has brought confidence to the task. My pairmate was quite hectic initially, he knew the theory, but he was under the pressure of the task size and how critical this task was. From my side, I was not scared at all. I did not know what to do, but I was confident that we could do it. My behaviour made them feel safe and do the job.
As Staff+ you need to radiate confidence and calmness. We know that this is only a job, and we can do it. It's only a matter of time. Other people will follow you.

2️⃣ Normalise things. Some people might be hesitant to ask questions, because they consider them "stupid" and obvious to others. There are lots of such people, actually. You, as Staff+ can change that — just ask a "stupid" question and show others that it's safe and helps to achieve the results. This way, you normalise some behaviour in your group.
You can normalise other things as well and make your team stronger this way:
* fail, take public accountability for the failure, and fix it — this way you show that making mistakes is safe;
* on the meeting, ask a person who has something to say, but is silent, about their opinion. Make a room for them to speak out.
* praise or celebrate in public — normalise acknowledging the good things 🎉

3️⃣ Be positive. You have to be positive you don't have any other choice. Staff+ it's not a role where you can say — things are shit and I don't know what to do about it. Things might be tough, and it's fine to recognise that. But you need to indicate that there is a way out or that you, together, will figure it out. Because if you don't do it, people might lose hope at all, and this is not what we want. For any problem, after a short period of grief, there is only one question to ask: what can we do about it?.

Staff+ behaviour might be an effective motivation for people around. Let's use it wisely. You and your actions shall lay down a solid bedrock upon which it's possible to build and strive to success.

⚙️ Staff+ and architecture

When I started professional software development the world was different. It was fine to slap PHP here and there and you got your software masterpiece. Frameworks were not a thing for me. I remember I had a dialog with my friend that time and we both agreed that nobody needs a framework because "we can do it ourselves". It was a time when each company had their own framework, which at first was nice and slick but than quickly grew to 🧟‍♂️ Frankenstein as more and more of the new functionality was added. Reality has proven, that it was impossible to maintain such, which meant it was impossible to grow the business.

There are still businesses that bring their owners thousands of dollars and consist of a the huge PHP file and no frameworks. But these are exceptions and, usually, are maintained by the small amount of people.

Architecture for the Staff+ engineers is not a question whether to use PHP or Go or to use framework or not. From my perspective architectures which Staff+ is helping to build shall confirm to two purposes:

1️⃣ It shall help the business reach its goal

2️⃣ It shall be maintainable in the long run

Good Staff+ engineer possesses the skill of balancing between these two goals. There is no single article or book that will help you to understand how to find this balance. You rather master it through out your life.

However, there are quite good tools that we can use as a baseline when we reflect on the architecture. I like these two:
* AWS Well-Architected Framework. This framework explains to us, that each successful software solution (and business) relies on six important pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, cost optimisation, sustainability. When we have this foundation solid and developed relatively equally, then we have a higher chance of building a long-lasting software setup.
* DORA metrics. Four metrics that can predict if the engineering component of your business is performing well. Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore service. Investing in these four is a safe investment and will definitely help your setup to keep going.

As Staff+ engineers we are not expected to be the best architects and experts in their company, but what we shall do — we shall apply our expertise to make sure that the architecture performs it's purpose. Which means it will be something which teams can maintain and develop throughout the years and it will help business to achieve it's goals.