richkuz

Technical Expectations for Engineering Managers

I did not use AI to write or review this. These are my own half-baked thoughts.

EMs own their team’s software development process.

EMs own the quality of their teams’ output.

EMs are responsible for ensuring the team works efficiently.

richkuz

What makes an awesome engineer?

A simple way to visualize what makes a great engineer:

• Strong technical acumen

• Works well with others

richkuz

Project Ownership

So you recently volunteered or were assigned to be the project owner for a large engineering deliverable.

Here's a guide to help you succeed.

What's a project owner?

What does it mean to be a project owner? What are the expectations for the role? How to do it well?

richkuz

Use your 49%

In most software teams I've worked on I think about decision making this way:

• Product Manager / Product Owner has 51% of the vote for what we choose to build.

• Designer has 51% of the vote for how it looks.

• Architect/Tech Lead has 51% of the vote for how it's built.

richkuz

I was able to render an OnlyOffice document in React using the OnlyOffice local document server running in Docker with a JWT key and token.

This version also supports saving the document to my server automatically or on-demand.

Issues solved with this example include:

1. Succesfully loading a document hosted on my local Python flask app when the JWT token setting is enabled while running OnlyOffice document server in docker on Mac OSX.

richkuz

In a Looker table calculation custom expression you can compute the max or min value of a date time object using an expression like this:

max(
  (100 * 100 * 100 * 100 * 100 * extract_years(${table.created_at})) +
  (100 * 100 * 100 * 100 * extract_months(${table.created_at})) +
  (100 * 100 * 100 * extract_days(${table.created_at})) +
  (100 * 100 * extract_hours(${table.created_at})) +
  (100 * extract_minutes(${table.created_at})) +
 (extract_seconds(${table.created_at}))

richkuz

To delegate effectively to a new team, you have to explain the following:

1. Context and goal
2. Expected results
3. What to do
4. How to do it

As the team grows and they learn how to do the work, it become sufficient and appropriate to explain only the first three bullet points. As the team further progresses, you can communicate the first 2 bullet points and the team will figure out what to do and how to do it. Finally, with high performing teams/individuals, you can provide context and the goal, and the team defines the rest.

richkuz

Jira Issue Create Bookmarklet

This bookmarklet lets you pop the Jira "Create Issue" dialog with values pre-populated. You have to be on a Jira page for this to work.

Create a new Bookmark in Chrome:

Bookmark name: “whatever”

URL:

richkuz

# Example Jira GraphQL API to fetch a Cloud ID, query for issues with JQL, and get issues with links, i.e. child issues
#
# Run this in https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/atlassian-graphql-api/graphql/explorer/
#
# In the GraphQL explorer UI, at the bottom, add these Request Headers:
# {
#   "X-ExperimentalApi" : "JiraIssueSearch"
# }
#
query fetchCloudId {

richkuz

// Given an element, select a range of text given a start and end character position offset relative
// to the element's innerText, not counting any HTML markup in the element.

// Partial credit: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16662393/insert-html-into-text-node-with-javascript
function injectMarkerIntoTextNode(node, startIndex) {
	// startIndex is beginning location of the text to inject a span
  let parentNode = node.parentNode;
  
  var s = node.nodeValue;
  var beforePart = s.substring(0, startIndex);