One of the most common next step in a software engineer’s career is the role of Engineering Manager. Although the role may describe different responsibilities in different companies I am implying here, the responsibility of managing 3-10 software engineers in a team and being responsible for their output and growth. However, a newly minted engineering manager almost never has background in people management and has received very little training in doing his/her job well. If you are one such person this post is for you. In this post, I will share all the readings that I found useful in building my own perspective on how to be a good engineering manager.

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on thinking through parts of neuroscience research that can be adopted when creating online video courses. I use the example of creating an online course on Software Testing for this series. I rely heavily on Make It Stick by Peter Brown and others for my research.

I have been playing around with Elixir and Phoenix over the last couple of months. I have also just joined Up Learn as the Head of Engineering with the enviable job of rebuilding the platform for long term maintenance and use. This post is about the conundrum of whether to go with Phoenix as the backend web framework when rebuilding the platform. The alternative would be Django, a framework I have used for almost 10 years.

Having built tech teams in several companies I have had an opportunity to evaluate a variety of candidates. While there is a fair amount of discussion on what technical skills one should look for and how not to evaluate technical skills, there is very little out there about what values and ethics to look for in candidates. Here I share the key ethical principles I aspire to have in my tech team members (including me).

Starting the journey as Head of Engineering at Up Learn as allowed me to reflect on the question of how one should go about architecting systems and choosing technologies when building for an early stage startup. I have built systems for a couple of startups in the past, which allows be to fall back on some experience. But I realised that sharing these thoughts will be useful for others on the same journey and for my future self in case I forget.

Lantum embarked on the journey of building a microservices based architecture over a year ago, and it has been a long journey. Over this time we have learned quite a few things about such an architecture that no one tells you in the text books. I share this knowledge in the hope that if you are in the process of making architecture decisions or have already chosen to build a microservices based architecture then you have some practical experiences to make your future decisions on.