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What is innovation?
#84 – April 11, 2022
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By now, most engineering leaders are familiar with the four DORA engineering metrics: change lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore service. But before you jump head-first into tracking DORA metrics, read this article to find out their exact definitions, limitations, and some common pitfalls.
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There are a lot of ways to think about innovation, but for me I always start with the idea of a hill climbing algorithm. You’re at a point in a two dimensional space, each point in that space has a value, you want to be at the point with the highest value, but you can only see the values of adjacent points.
Engineering Managers (EMs) don’t intentionally set out to fail. Instead, they are often set up for failure. But even if they are set up for success, there are some common ways new Engineering Managers fail. This article will cover these and what to do instead.
The fundamental work expectation for software engineers is to deliver their assigned work on schedule—engineers should be productive and reliable. Many engineers, particularly inexperienced ones, focus too much on productivity (writing lots of code) and not enough on reliability (delivering quality on time). Yet, anyone depending on them (managers, peers, partner teams) would rather get working code on schedule than fancy code eventually.
It actually works extraordinarily well if you find the right motivated people and give them the proper support. A single team will form and storm and all of that, and they’ll eventually get to a place of high performance. The problems really start when you are coordinating across teams – even if they have no dependencies.
To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, we’re publishing in this post an updated set of data infrastructure architectures. They show the current best-in-class stack across both analytic and operational systems, as gathered from numerous operators we spoke with over the last year. Each architectural blueprint includes a summary of what’s changed since the prior version.