DEV Community: Bartek Ciszkowski

Boxes

Bartek Ciszkowski — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:24:56 +0000

We're all far too familiar with the black box. It is the system which claims the sky is blue but as you bang your head against the wall, all you see are clouds.

Our black box usually looks like this:

Over time, we learn more about that black box. Through discovery of relevant documentation, conversations with owners of said box, and in many cases, the perusing of Stack overflow. A mental model for what the black box is doing begins to form and soon, input can more easily translate into expected output, consistently. We'll rarely have access to its internals but we gain confidence through consistency. Consistency is nice.

But it doesn't end here! Our input is usually derived from many other boxes:

These boxes usually sit within our teams, organization, or publicly as open source. They vary in initial clarity and over time we become more clear in their inner workings. Many will stay opaque until a specific incident or task necessitates our learning. These are your databases, queuing systems, libraries, tooling, etc. These boxes are shared by teams and include some sort of upkeep where documentation and other forms of technical debt are managed in an effort to keep the box intact. Finally, we usually have access to the source code in one way or another (private company repositories, open source)

It's expected over time we get familiar with these and we'll feel comfortable to mentor others in their workings and even add a line to our resume highlighting our competence!

Though our confidence in the mechanics of these boxes increases, so does our humility.

What's a previously mentioned word that's important for software engineers? Consistency! In a perfect, magical world where no one would likely have a job because everything is perfect, every box would output beautifully consistent streams of data towards our input. Rather, we're usually dealing with a level of messy-ness in the hopes of consistent output to our other boxes.

Our confidence in our aforementioned boxes becomes elastic as we introduce data. Data is consistent, until it isn't. It surprises us and the messy-ness is not through the fault of any particular individual or system, but usually the layering of historical choices, trade-offs, and decisions made explicitly due to the nature of the organization, relating systems, etc.

We're going to spend the lifetime of our careers learning how to wrangle with these boxes but let's remind ourselves how they came to be.

So where the heck am I going with this?

Adjoining these boxes are humans. Humans who have put effort into shaping these boxes, who maintain and support them, and who help craft new ideas through their community leadership.

The humans who lend a hand, provide clarity, who ask questions and play rubber duck, who closes tickets and write documentation. The humans who pair program, fight a fire, and share their status update in standup, proudly proclaiming they solved that pesky bug (throw them a high-five right now!)

They are coworkers, open source maintainers, community managers, hobbyists, conference speakers.

exhales Humans are pretty rad, aren't they?

You may be just starting off or ten years into this, but every day you interact with one of these boxes you are also provided the opportunity to take note of a fellow human. You're probably already doing great at being an awesome human but I hope this was an enjoyable reminder! And if you feel like you've slipped lately, I hope you're doing OK. Remember there's always someone to lend a hand if you need it.

And of course, you'll figure lots of things out yourself. Just remember to leave notes for everyone else.

woopsytime - Track the bad habits you want to change

Bartek Ciszkowski — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:15:47 +0000

I don't know if this is feasible but before I even begin exploring, I want to dump my idea out. This is definitely in the "whacky" territory!

woopsytime is a Chrome extension which tracks the time you spent on your own list of defined domains and submits timed visits to an API

What API is that? I don't think it'll be GitHub. A sort of key-value store with a unique identifier

You will then run a GitHub Action periodically to fetch data from this key value store. The action will write your woopsies to a CSV (via a GitHub Action). You will connect to your data via an identity token that matches the unique identifier in your instance of the Chrome extension

Your GitHub profile is so focused on all the great things you're doing, but why not also share some of your faults?!

Is this a good idea? Most definitely not! Might it be fun to hack on for a week or two? Maybe!

Remote brainstorming for regular humans

Bartek Ciszkowski — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:29:42 +0000

When going remote, we habitually forget much of what makes us effective in person. Working in the completely different, and at times frustrating, setting of remote sessions may entice us to find expensive, complicated tools to solve our problems. In a brainstorm session specifically, we want to reduce our cognitive load and encourage ideas, thoughts, and questions which lead us to understanding, and perhaps, solving a problem!

When we introduce new tools, rather than focusing on classic, human heuristics, we risk being blinded by shiny-tool syndrome. As I wrote this post, I was reminded of a game I played a few years back, titled Regular Human Basketball. In it, you are a few regular humans trying to control a haphazardly built machine with the goal of scoring against your opponent. The results generally look something like, well, this:

Honestly, that game is fantastic analogy for any dysfunctional process, team, or piece of software. But today we’re going to speak about facilitating a remote brainstorm session, respecting our fellow humans, and actually taking advantage of being fully remote!

By the end of this post, I do think you’ll look back and think, Huh, this all seemed remarkably simple! And it is.

Let’s begin with the virtual room. We’re all in individual rooms, but the facilitation occurs in an exclusively digital space, not physical. We benefit from having everyone remote, and we don’t have the challenge of a smaller subset of — usually ignored — participants joining a filled conference room.

This virtual setting by default enables equal voice but the reality is some may find difficulty in contributing. As a meeting goes on, they may be unsure when to jump in, perhaps they feel as if they are interrupting, asking questions already answered, or not contributing. Just like in-person meetings, you’ll need to be intentional about providing voice for everyone. This can be achieved by asking direct questions, providing space for pauses, or assigning specific, contributory roles to everyone. Most especially consider those new to the team, junior engineers, and those from underrepresented communities. If possible, do your best to get to know them ahead of your time together so you can understand how to best support them. Like you, they are here for a reason and have something to contribute — so provide them the platform!

It’s also wise to consider the number of people. This won’t be your last brainstorm session and you can rotate through various parties, pulling people in and out, iterating until you have reached your goal. So, try to keep it small. I’ve found three to four is effective.

Well ahead of the session, you should be observing the problem. What is the problem? Who does it impact? What measurements do we have in place today to understand how it’s hampering our ability to meet our objectives? If we looked to solve this problem, what would our objective look like? Many of these are reflected as you produce OKRs. If you aren’t there yet, consider what those objectives and key results may look like. This allows you to maintain focus when brainstorming. I won’t speak much on this topic today, and rather highlight a fantastic piece by Teresa Torres from Product Talk, which gets you thinking proper on defining your opportunity.

Now that we have our party assembled and our problem defined, we can begin! In an in-office environment that’s likely going to include a whiteboard, or post-it notes, or maybe a Microsoft Surface if you’ve got that VC Money. But in the digital space, it normally looks like this:

Your role in this exercise is to extract the most important and relevant bits out of your party’s collective minds and placing them into this document. It’s beneficial to consider this document will transform into permanent documentation, especially as its scope is refined. But getting those minds buzzing can be difficult! A blank slate can be daunting or a great way to get a stream of consciousness out. The value gained from allowing a team member to let their energized thoughts travel is immense.

How do we be most effective? First, define roles. One of you must play the role of capturing the stream. You may be privileged enough to have a project manager in the room, but if you don’t, someone will need to capture the discussion. Since this article is about facilitating such a meeting, let’s assume that person is you!

You have a big job ahead. You should have some knowledge of the subject. You need to know what questions to ask to get the conversation started (try beginning at a previously defined objective or stated problem). Once things are going, you control the course of the meeting — You are capturing thoughts, tabling questions, keeping track of time, cycling back, encouraging breaks, opening up space to think, connecting dots, providing relevant segways, revisiting objectives, maintaining focus, deep breath and asking questions, just to name a … few.

The session does not have to begin with a blank slate, but simple is valuable. Having a template to guide the conversation can be valuable for those new to the exercise, and it can relieve anxieties around how to best contribute. I won’t provide brainstorm templates in this post, but I’d be joyous to speak to you about them, so reach out if you want some help.

Now you’ll notice I am promoting a very simple process here. No exceptional tools have been mentioned, and that’s what I want to keep cycling back to. The greatest gain you’ll have in this meeting is not from tinkering with the latest mind mapping tool, but through extracting a flow of energized and pointed thoughts.

So let’s remove all distractions. As a facilitator who is potentially sharing their screen, drop any notifications, close personal messaging applications, and especially close Slack. Anything that has potential to distract! What distracts you, distracts everyone.

What else is a distraction? Having the biological need of a bio break or a drink of water. A good brainstorm session may only really get going after 40-60 minutes, so let’s consider breaks. I like to use a Pomodoro Timer as a way to keep me in check, but you can just as easily watch the clock. A break has the expected benefit of allowing humans to function as humans do, allowing them to remove the cognitive load of Damnit I really just gotta go pee, but we have also opened up space for everyone to process the problem. This is a time when everyone should step away from the discussion, including the facilitator. Rather than using the time to clean up the notes (seriously, don’t, it’s fine for now!), you must consider your other responsibilities in this process. Reviewing where things left off and re-entering the conversation with a deliberate, aligning question will put the team back into that free flowing state.

As important as breaks are, so is silence. We treat silence as an awkward space that we want to fill, but it’s a space to breathe, have a drink of water, think. I want you to count to seven — try that right now.

Now imagine doing that in a meeting you’re leading. Seven seconds feels like a lifetime! But I want you to practice that. Let the thoughts flow, document them, but also let them rest. That space provides opportunity for others to jump in, too. You can’t have too much dead space, so ask questions and segway when timely, but be intentional about providing those seconds of space throughout. Don’t fill that space with Sorry just taking some notes here — let it be. This is a healthy habit that you can lead by example with, and practice in any setting.

Dependent on the stage of a project you’re at, you may want to get white boarding. Staying true to my focus on simplicity, there are a variety of great tools, but honestly, many frustrating ones. I love Excalidraw, which is a white boarding tool (with built-in collaboration) that is distraction free, has fantastic keybindings and has a deliberate depth of detail without forcing you into low level details. When white boarding, a team should follow the same principles as when we’re writing. Question more at this stage, and connect meaning as you build out a workflow. Tools which stay out of your work work best, so when you’re ready to whiteboard digitally, Excalidraw is my tool of choice.

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As the brainstorm session nears its end, consider your next steps. The documents or diagrams you’ve produced today can morph into permanent documentation, so take some time to clean things up. Identify tabled questions for follow-up meetings or discussions with stakeholders. Reflect on who participated, but more importantly, who didn’t. Reach out to those who didn’t and see how you can help. Even better, if you’re their manager, work with them to identify opportunities in this process.

I hope you enjoyed this post. These aren’t revolutionary ideas, but I do feel they are important to be reminded of. With that in mind, I’ve provided you this handy image as a reference for them. Download it or print it out, and I’d love to hear if you’ve used it in any capacity!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please share it by clicking the button below.

Building relationships as a remote engineering manager

Bartek Ciszkowski — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:19:30 +0000

For the past few years, I had been supporting the growth of individuals in and out of office environments. I had reports that worked out of the same HQ I did and reports distributed around the globe. Ultimately, I had the benefit of having the majority of my team in the same office as I was, while I was building my skills in managing distributed teams.

This past September, that dynamic changed. I moved to Boston, shifted to an entirely new set of engineering teams, and became a remote manager. My reports were now based out of HQ (Toronto), Bulgaria, and the UK.

The majority of my reports were new-to-me, likewise stakeholders, and as well, the technology stack. What I’ve observed over the past several months is the challenges specific to building relationships within your engineering team and across the organization. This is my experience, in brief.

A stakeholder has entered the chat

A large part of a manager’s role is understanding your team, the stakeholders, and how that ties in with business needs. Relationships are built through 1:1s, lunch table chats, coffee walks, hallway chats before a meeting, and of course, within meetings.

And thus, the initial challenge is revealed. In an office environment, you have an incredible amount of opportunity to organically build rapport with a wide range of people extending beyond your immediate team.

It’s expected that you’ll build relationships with other business leaders, including those not on the engineering team. They’ll work with you to take business requirements and turn them into results — these are your stakeholders.

I believe a good manager is one who actively listens, and speaks when necessary. And I believe that actively listening is a necessary step to building rapport with other business leaders. In an ideal world, your stakeholders will come to you prepared with prioritized roadmaps, decision logs, and an army of people ready to support an initiative.

But let’s be real. They’ve had to can projects, shift timelines, juggle resources, and make compromises — just like you!

So, listen. You’ll find listening helps you ask questions with context, it allows you to be empathetic, and it builds the mental models which help you make long term decisions that satisfy that blend of functional and technical requirements.

Within that, you’ll learn about the person on the other side. You don’t have the benefit of an office environment, so these interactions are limited to bi-weekly/monthly product checkins. Consider asking for more time so you can learn beyond the projects. How do they work? What makes them tick?

You may be surprised how similar the questions you’d ask in a 1:1 with a direct report work with other product managers. Think horizontally so your relationship building has wings.

Meet these other leaders often and early. Take the initiative and setup time. Be clear what you’re looking to learn from them — get to know their problems and vision. Become part of their support network so that they can become part of yours.

Getting to know your team

It’s time for your first 1:1 with a new team member and it’s on Zoom! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could spend a week doing team on-boarding at HQ?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. You’ll want to have the camera on and ideally, it’s not pointing up into your nose. I’m not going to get into more than that for this post, so remember one simple thing: Show your team member that you’re a human.

This isn’t just about being visibly human, but about actually being human.

A mistake I made early on in my remote management career was to focus on everything but the actual person. In our early 1:1s we dove into setting expectations for growth (goals!), understanding projects, initiatives, that team member’s understanding of the code base, and everything that did not include sharing who I am and understanding who they are.

These are all fantastic things to do as a manager, but they preceded getting to know the person on the other line. This meant that I did not share who I was, and thus, it took longer to build rapport. I genuinely struggled to get to know my team better than others within the business.

It likely had to do with the pressure of effectively using the 60 minutes we allotted for that 1:1. My brain wanted to optimize for the little bit of time we had that week while not registering that I was lacking the benefit of the in-office interactions I previously had.

So, start at knowing the person behind the screen. Let them know who you are, and make space for those human conversations within each 1:1. You may wonder, what do we talk about?

It doesn’t really matter. You can start at the weather. Share a story about your weekend. They’ll share one about theirs, perhaps. You may struggle with finding things in common, but that’s not the point. Open up first, and you’ll find others will follow. Then listen. Take note of important dates, favourite treats, a colleague they highlight as doing a great job (For the record, a great question to ask them!)

Over time, you’ll learn more about your team member, but it begins with you putting in that effort. I do believe that it takes longer to feel comfortable here, so investing that time early and often will provide results down the line.

Eventually, you may have the privilege of meeting in-person. Usually through a company offsite. You should definitely have a 1:1 during this time, and you can even enjoy a change of scenery — coffee walk!

Beyond that, an in-person 1:1 should not be different. You should not wait to provide critical feedback or performance reviews during these visits. But, you should consider the opportunities that can arise.

For example, your team member may have recently completed a significant project and you should know how they like to treat themselves — Perhaps leave them a treat on their desk?

How you interact when 99% of your interactions are online will look different than if you were in the same office, but by working towards getting to know each other not only individually, but as a group, you’ll find that we’re in a place today where the tools available to us help break down those barriers. You’ll still stumble over the End Meeting button within Zoom on a regular basis, but if you’ve built those relationships, it’s simply another chuckle for that day.

Set an example

Consider the image you portray to the people around you. When in an office, did you look busy all the time? Were you visibly present to your team on a regular basis? How did you communicate and deliver team updates?

How you present yourself is just as important as a remote manager. Yes, you should shower, and yes, you can wear sweatpants all day (For the record, I'm partial to Uniqlo's offerings). However, it is the written form that has a higher significance in how you’re representing yourself.

The words you use — and how and when you use them matter. They become a huge part of your personality!

Your life as a manager includes a lot of Slack (or whatever workspace tool you use), and a ton of context switching. And as a manager, you need to be aware of what is occurring when you ping a report on Slack. Are they clear on the expectations of how and when they should respond to that message?

What I want from my teams are for them to be able to collaborate, work together towards an aligned goal, and as much as possible, do deep work.

I believe beyond explicitly stating them, practicing the habits you want to enforce yourself is key to keeping that consistent across a team. These habits come not just from policy, but through setting a good example. Be the one leading the charge, and/or lift up a senior member of your team to be that person.

Define best practices around how to use your various communication channels. For example, Slack is great for quick asynchronous discovery and sharing of bits-and-bytes, where-as you may leverage GitHub Issues to form discussions around pending architectural decisions.

And remember to balance the noise. Talk to your team about deep work. Make it clear that turning off Slack for extended periods of time is OK, and be clear what communication channels team members are expected to respond within. Do this yourself too. (Yes, you busy manager, block some time and do deep work! You need to work on the business too)

And if you haven’t realized it yet, get used to this — you’re going to spend a lot of time writing.

Consider how you craft a message in the various mediums. The way you write a Slack message that is meant as a quick consumable will vary from the documentation you write to support an architectural change, and that’ll vary from the email you write to a stakeholder about a missed deadline.

Think like a carpenter here. Measure twice, cut once. You are delivering so much in these packets of information — expectations, updates, and yourself.

This completes the third pillar of building relationships. In this case, you have the opportunity to form relationships across the team. Setting clear expectations and good examples provides teams the ability to work on an equal plane and it naturally opens up a space to collaborate effectively.

Be yourself

I’ll end this post with what I believe to be a reasonable thought.

Be yourself. Write like how you’d talk in person.

Being remote doesn’t turn you into a robot. It can feel that way, so don’t forget that you can be yourself. It doesn’t have to be all business, and that’ll help you remember the people on the other side also aren’t pixels on a screen, being projected by some dystopian A.I.

Be yourself, because it’s you that is building relationships, forming a team, and helping others grow.

Thanks for listening.

Boosting your Slack productivity while still having a good time

Bartek Ciszkowski — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 02:07:46 +0000

Slack, as their stock ticker suggests, is about getting $WORK done! Among its qualities, allowing distributed teams to work effectively is near the top of the list for why modern organizations are using it.

It's also a tool which can perpetuate always-available culture, disrupt work-life balance, and reduce focus.

Now, before we get into the nitty gritty. I should state that this is not a problem with Slack. This is a cultural problem and no one tool will fix or resolve it. Slack is simply the most popular tool out there, and thus a good analog to our problem.

So, in this post. I'll share with you strategies in shifting how you use Slack that'll continue to give you all the benefits you enjoy, while boosting your productivity (and sanity)

I should caveat that some jobs require you to be on Slack at all times. Think customer support roles, etc. Just remember to follow this advice on your lunch (and after hours) :)

Prioritization is hard, made more difficult when a notification provides no sense of priority

Depending on the size of your organization, you are likely part of dozens of Slack channels. You've perhaps muted some that are mainly noise.

You'll be pinged -- either via @here, @channel, or directly -- in any of those channels from time to time. Slack has no sense of priority for a message (although it has experimented with this in the past) so it's nearly impossible to know what you should read immediately versus later.

Similar to advice I'd give with email, I'd recommend to not have Slack open for chunks of the day. My routine with email is to check-in three times a day. Morning, lunch, end of day. On days of more focus, this is reduced to a single morning check-in.

There is absolutely no reason that you could not do the same thing with Slack.

I won't lie to you. I think this is really difficult! We love to be engaged with our team, but we also love focus. If you struggle with the notion of not checking Slack for hours on end, try using the Pomodoro Technique to go through intervals of focus and break, where-in you then could pop into Slack.

Setting good expectations for yourself can help shape your organization

Unless your workplace has a written-down Slack / real-time communications policy, the expectations will likely be inconsistent across teams and managers.

Your manager pings you with a question. You don't know this yet because hey, it's 11am and you've been working hard on a refactor of your redux-forms implementation!

You've wrapped up a good sprint of work and see the question. Your manager had a question ahead of going into a meeting about a technical detail about the product, that only you would know.

How do you feel? You missed the opportunity to help them. In my battle to reduce the amount of time your eyes are on Slack, this is also a less ideal case than typical notifications.

But I highlight it because even in such timely challenges, there's improvements your manager and team can make to the process.

Now, I'm going to assume your manager is not an asshole and would value your feedback if they brought up your reaction times on Slack. In a 1:1, this would be an empowering time for you to bring up why you don't always immediately respond, highlighting your desire to focus.

You can then work together to find ways to improve documentation and communication. If you know that next week on Tuesday, a big launch is occurring for your team, you will keep more eyes on Slack that day.

And that's an important distinction. Situations are not binary; If you're empowered with the knowledge of when important events are occurring, you're able to use your judgement on how active you are on Slack. Ultimately, you're a good person who wants to help your team.

It's about finding a balance where you can thrive, setting healthy expectations, while also supporting your team when they need it.

Never allow Slack to take over all your screens

No Slack-sanity article is complete without the recommendation to turn off notifications.

Not just on your desktop, but your phone too. Remove the ability for your focus to be disrupted across screens. We've already discussed the need to set expectations and keep your eyes off Slack on a regular basis, so this just drives that home.

But it's dually important when you get away from work. Think weekends, vacation.

How many of your bosses do you know respond or check-in on Slack during vacation? Honestly, it's not healthy, and the expectation you should set is the opposite of that.

How you manage Slack yourself can spread healthy habits across your team, and perhaps organization. Through conversations with your manager and sharing strategy with your teammates, these small but powerful adjustments in work can trickle-up to the top, all the while making your team more focused on what matters.

Finally, of course -- sometimes you just want to watch cat gifs, and that's OK. Enjoy your new, adjusted Slack expectations but don't forget what's truly important -- cats on the internet.