From convincing your team to come back to the office, to optimizing your daily habits, March was all about making difficult decisions. In no particular order, here are the five articles you need to read on LeadDev.
1. Camille Fournier, Managing a return to (hybrid) work
As more and more companies push to get people back into the office, engineering managers are being placed in a difficult situation. Where many developers found themselves just as productive working from home during the pandemic, and whole teams changed the way they work to accommodate for this new way of working, how can you effectively reverse that tide if you get asked to?
Fortunately Camille Fournier, author of The Manager’s Path, has some sound advice for putting the hybrid back into hybrid work.
“Few people are excited about giving this message and dealing with the fallout from it. While there are many aspects of returning to the office that are out of your control, here are some areas that you can focus on,” she writes.
2. Harry Guinness, How engineering leaders can better organize their day
Everyone is feeling the pressure this year as teams are being asked to deliver more with less. That means it has never been more important to be ruthless with your time and optimize wherever possible. Harry Guinness went out and asked a bunch of engineers what tricks they use to hack their productivity.
“As an engineering leader, there will always be some things – like unexpected client calls or server outages – that crop up and demand your immediate attention. Still, if you take the time to look at your to-do list and prioritize your tasks on any given day or week, you can make more informed decisions about what can slip to a later date and what just has to get done now,” he writes.
3. Sarah Millstein, How team agreements promote high performance
All teams operate under a set of written and unwritten agreements. In this piece, Sarah Millstein examines how to optimize these agreements to build high performing teams.
“Although the strongest agreements are often silent, there are many ways you can explicitly introduce and improve them. If you’re starting up a new team or troubleshooting one that’s flailing, make sure you’ve got strong agreements in place,” she writes.
4. Jason Lengstorf, Four ways great leaders can build strong teams
As VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, Jason Lengstorf, sees it, every strong team has four characteristics: clarity, confidence, alignment, and trust. And remember, “As a leader, none of your strategy or vision matters if the team doesn’t know about it, understand it, agree on it, and trust you,” he writes.
5. Nadia Makarevich, What makes a front-end developer in 2023?
Few developer roles have seen so much change as that of the front-end developer over the past decade. In this article, Nadia Makarevich takes us down memory lane, before laying out the fundamentals of front-end software development for 2023 and beyond.
“In the last 10-15 years of front-end development, we have managed to transition from HTML with a few dropdowns on JQuery, to full-on Single Page Applications, where the entire logic of the web experience is written on the frontend, and the backend is a very thin layer that mainly handles authorization and fetching data from the database,” she writes.
