DEV Community: Nico S___

Emotional Labour

Nico S___ — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 03:12:57 +0000

Originally posted on Substack

Lately, I've discovered that one of the biggest challenges of being a leader is the Emotional Labour involved. Emotional labour refers to the effort and energy that leaders put into managing their own emotions and the emotions of those around them. This can include tasks such as maintaining a positive attitude, providing support to team members, resolving conflicts, and managing stress. We work hard to create a Safe Environment where people can thrive on. We look for opportunities for team members to grow. We discuss and help solve interpersonal issues in our teams. Etc.

One of the main challenges of emotional labour is that it can be draining and exhausting for leaders. They may feel overwhelmed by the emotional demands of their job and struggle to maintain their own well-being. Additionally, emotional labour often goes unnoticed or undervalued, which can lead to burnout and dissatisfaction.

This leaves us drained of Emotional Energy. So when we switch off from work to home mode, we are out of energy to be empathetic and caring at home. This leads to arguments and struggles if we don't keep ourselves in check.

To address this challenge, leaders need to prioritize self-care and seek support from others. They may also need to develop strategies for managing their emotions more effectively, such as mindfulness practices or regular exercise. By taking care of themselves, leaders can better manage the emotional demands of their job and continue to lead with empathy and compassion.

It's important for us to realize the toll that work can take on our emotional energy levels and make a conscious effort to replenish them before heading home. This can include taking short breaks throughout the workday to recharge, practicing mindfulness or meditation, engaging in physical exercise, or simply taking time to disconnect from work-related thoughts and worries.

By prioritizing our own emotional well-being, we can show up fully present and engaged for our loved ones and avoid unnecessary conflicts and stress at home. It's also important to communicate with our partners and families about our work-related responsibilities and stressors, so they can understand and support us in balancing work and home life.

Trust but Verify

Nico S___ — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 02:57:47 +0000

Originally published on my substack.

The phrase "trust but verify" is a Russian proverb that became internationally known when former US President Ronald Reagan used it during his negotiations with the Soviet Union. The principle behind it is simple: while trust is important in any relationship, it is also essential to verify that the other party is following through on their promises.

In the world of technology, this is a critical principle for effective team leadership. Development teams are made up of highly skilled individuals, who must work collaboratively to develop and maintain complex systems. These teams rely on trust to share ideas, work together, and deliver high-quality products. However, as with any relationship, trust alone is not enough. Verification is necessary to ensure that the team is meeting its goals and delivering quality results.

One way to apply this principle in leadership is through progress updates and performance metrics. Establishing clear goals, and tracking progress toward them, makes a transparent and fair process for all involved. Team leaders can use these updates to verify that the team is making progress and to identify any areas that may need additional attention or support.

Another way to apply the principle is through code reviews and testing. The quality of the code is critical to the success of the system. Code reviews and testing provide an opportunity to verify that the code meets the necessary standards and is functioning as intended. By doing this, team leaders can demonstrate their commitment to quality, and verify that the team is performing as expected.

It is also important for team leaders to encourage open communication and transparency. When team members are open about their progress, challenges, and concerns, it is easier to establish trust and verify that the team is meeting its goals. Leaders can foster a culture of transparency by encouraging team members to share updates, ask questions, and provide feedback on the project.

However, it is also important to recognize that this principle is a delicate balance. Too much verification can erode trust and create a culture of suspicion and micromanagement. Conversely, too much trust without verification can lead to missed deadlines, poor quality, and ultimately project failure. Team leaders must strike a balance between trust and verification, establishing a culture of accountability while still fostering a collaborative and supportive environment.

In conclusion, the "trust but verify" principle is a critical component of effective team leadership. By establishing clear goals, tracking progress, conducting code reviews and testing, encouraging open communication, and striking a balance between trust and verification, team leaders can create high performing teams that deliver quality outcomes.

DevOps in early stage Startups

Nico S___ — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 18:30:07 +0000

Originally posted on my Substack

A startup is always constrained by time. Specifically, their runway ($ in the bank until next capital raise). It's key to iterate and validate ideas as quick as possible. It all comes down to feedback loops. Here is where DevOps can help.

From developers writing code and quickly finding out if it's breaking anything (test automation, continuous integration). To developers interacting with Designers and PMs to verify features are working as expected (continuous deployment, ephemeral environments), and finally getting feedback from users and customers as early as possible (feature flags). DevOps underpins it all.

Many engineers focus on the tooling aspect of DevOps. But without Dev there is no Ops. This means creating and maintaining automated test. Architecting applications to be continuously delivered (avoiding dependency hell).

Who does DevOps work? everyone. But, as you grow and can afford more specialised roles, you can invest more into Ops. The goal of these roles is to enable and empower Engineers, not to do the work for them. Creating tooling and managing infrastructure. So teams can effortlessly operate the software they build. But then again, Engineers need to keep evolving how they architect their software to enable higher levels of automation and operation.

Running effective daily stand-ups

Nico S___ — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 18:17:02 +0000

Originally posted on my Substack

Long are the days when the three questions made any sense. Similarly, going around the room asking for updates on individual task can be dull and yield little value. You can do all those things by email or on your chosen team chat product. Status updates can be async and no one would miss anything of value.

We need to make good use of our sync time. After all, “too many meetings” is the main feedback that we hear from team members. So we focus instead on making sure that we are tracking on the right direction. Looking for opportunities to help each other, and learn from each other.

Here are the key things I focus my teams on during daily stand-ups:

Review the Iteration Goal
- Kanban teams: review any short-terms goals
Walk the board from right to left – discussing the work items closest to Done
- This keeps the focus on the work and what we can do as a Team to complete something.
- Encourage pairing and swarming by asking questions such as:
  - “Who can help on this item and get it to Done?” – this includes helping review and test the work done.
  - “Does this work item present a learning opportunity for someone else?”
Ensure all impediments have agreed-upon action items with names assigned
Finish with questions such as:
- “Is anyone working on items not shown on our board?”
- “Do we feel like we have a good plan of attack for today for achieving the Iteration Goal?”
- “Do we feel synchronized as a team?”

Simplicity over Flexibility

Nico S___ — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 18:13:01 +0000

Originally posted on my Substack

Looking back in my work experience I can see how often this principle holds true.

Simplicity and flexibility are often in tension with each other. When you focus on simplicity in the design of a system, it becomes easier to change and adapt to new situations. If you focus on flexibility, you may end up with a system that is harder to understand, use, and maintain.

By focusing on simplicity, we strip away unnecessary logic, dependencies, and complexity. This is because we don't try to optimise, or cater, for potential future scenarios. As a result, we create a streamlined system that is easy to understand and change. We reduce the cognitive load of working with the system. This allows more flexibility because there are fewer constraints and dependencies to consider. Making it easier to change and adapt to meet new requirements.

By focusing on flexibility, we may end up with a system that is harder to understand and maintain. This is because flexibility often requires more options, configurations, and dependencies. All which increase the cognitive load to operate and maintain the system.

In summary, simplicity often leads to greater flexibility in the long run. And we do that by avoiding unnecessary complexity.

Managing individual’s expectations

Nico S___ — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 19:23:54 +0000

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime you just might find. You get what you need.

Managing teams of high skilled software engineers can be challenging. Particularly when their expectations are not met

Sometimes it feels like a zero sum game. They can’t all get what they want all the time. Finding alignment, or even compromises, is tedious work at the best of times

The real problem arises when individuals can’t get past their views and ideas not being chosen and adopted. Now we are in dangerous territory.

Everybody’s voices must be heard. And their concerns addressed. But beyond that, we must be able to commit and move on.

So what are we to do when an individual digs it’s heels, or continuously re litigates decisions.

Mentoring and coaching should be the first tools we reach out for. Helping these individuals grow and become better engineers.

If our efforts don’t bring a satisfactory outcome, then we must coach the individual to a role better suited to its skills and interests.

It’s hard work. Emotionally taxing. And never pleasant. But is the role I’ve chosen.

Godspeed

Creating a redirect service in AWS

Nico S___ — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 20:31:33 +0000

Recently at work I encounter a challenge. We needed to migrate our company website from an agency to HubSpot. The challenge was that HubSpot does not support A records for root domains, only CNAME records. It also does not provide a domain redirect service, like the agency did. Furthermore, since we use AWS Route53 to manage our DNS, and we use our root domains for emails, we cannot have CNAME records alongside SOA records.

The workaround I managed to implement was using AWS S3 static website hosting, CloudFront with AWS Certificate Manager to support SSL, and of course Route53 to define the recordset.

Here is how it works.

Setting Up Amazon S3 to Redirect Root Traffic

The first step is to set up an Amazon S3 website to redirect traffic to our root domain, e.g. “mysite.com”.

Once you are logged in to your AWS account, under the “Services” menu, select “S3”. From the S3 control panel, select “Create bucket” to set up a bucket for your S3 website.

Name your bucket with the domain name. In our example, this is “mysite.com”. Use the region “US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1”. Untick the “Block all public access” option. Then click “Create” to create your bucket so that you can configure the options.

Your bucket, with the name of your domain, now appears in your list of S3 buckets. Click on it so that you can configure the options needed for it to redirect traffic to your main domain.

After clicking on your bucket, select the “Properties” tab and click on the “Static website hosting” option. Select “Redirect requests” and enter the subdomain where HubSpot is hosting your website - “www.mysite.com”. Specify the protocol as “https”.

This specifies the entire functionality of the S3 website. All it does is take requests and forward them, over HTTPS, to “www.mysite.com”.

Next, we set up the SSL certificate.

Create an SSL certificate for the domain to Support HTTPS

Now we use the AWS Certificate Manager service. Click on Get Started and then Request a public certificate. Make sure you are in the “US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1” region.

Under “Domain name” enter the root domain “mysite.com”, as this provides maximum flexibility. Click “Next” and walk through the steps to validate the certificate.

Add the certificate to Route53 by expanding the domain and clicking on “create record on route53”.

When you are done, your new certificate will appear in the AWS Certificate Manager. Once the status shows as “Issued” it is ready to use with CloudFront.

Now we are ready to create the CloudFront distribution.

Creating a CloudFront Distribution

By itself, neither the DNS nor the S3 website redirection can handle HTTPS traffic. That’s because neither of them can host an SSL certificate for our website. For this purpose we use AWS CloudFront working together with S3.

From your AWS account, under the “Services” menu, select “CloudFront”. Next, from the CloudFront control panel, select “Create Distribution” and pick “Web” as the delivery method.

That will bring you to a “Create Distribution” form where you specify the CloudFront properties for your website. Under “Origin Domain Name” you select the S3 website that you just created. In our case, that is “mysite.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com”.

The “Origin ID” field will automatically populate with a unique identifier link “S3-mysite.com”. You can leave this alone, it is just used to uniquely identify the origin. Next, scroll down to the section “Default Cache Behaviour Settings”.

Make sure that you have selected “Redirect HTTP to HTTPS” for the “Viewer Protocol Policy” and that you have allowed all the HTTP methods. Once that is done, scroll down to the section labeled “Distribution Settings”. For the “SSL Certificate” property, select “Custom SSL” and select the certificate created in the previous step.

Add the root domain to Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs).

To finish, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Create Distribution”. That’s it, you are done setting up CloudFront with the necessary SSL certificate.

Your distribution will appear in the CloudFront listing. Once its status shows “Deployed”, you can start using it.

Now that CloudFront and Amazon S3 are set up, you can configure the DNS in Amazon Route 53.

Configuring Your Amazon Route 53 DNS

As mentioned previously, with this solution you need to use Amazon Route 53 as your DNS. The reason that you need to be on Route 53 is that you are going to point your root domain "A" record to your CloudFront distribution (rather than an IP address), and that is a proprietary capability within Amazon Route 53.

From your AWS account, under the “Services” menu, select “Route 53”. Click on “Hosted zone” in the Route 53 dashboard. The, click “Create Hosted Zone” to configure the DNS settings for “mysite.com”.

Enter your domain (e.g., “mysite.com”) under “Domain Name” and click “Create”. This will take you to the DNS editor for your domain. The first step is to create the "A" record for your root domain. Leave the “Name” blank. For “Type” select “A” and for “Alias” select “Yes”. For the “Alias Target”, you need to paste in the CloudFront distribution domain name.

To find that, open a new tab in your browser and go back to the CloudFront dashboard, click on your distribution, and under the “General” tab copy the “Domain Name” value.

Now, go back to your Route 53 tab and paste the “Domain Name” value into the “Alias Target” field. The click “Create” to enter the "A" record.

In Route 53, click on “Create Record Set” again. In the “Name” field, type “www”. Under “Type” select “CNAME”. Paste the HubSpot provided URL in the “Value” field.

Next, click on “Create” to create the “CNAME” record and you will end up back at the DNS table for your domain. As shown below, you should have and “A” record for the root domain that points to CloudFront and a “CNAME” record for “www” that points to HubSpot.

You have now configured your website to redirect from the root domain to “www” that works for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

Pen Pal Mentoring

Nico S___ — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 03:27:05 +0000

Introduction

I have been working in Software Development for over fifteen years. Nowadays I'm the Head of Technology for a small startup working on digital agents. Leadership is my passion.

I've discovered that there are three core approaches to Leadership:

Mentorship
Coaching
Sponsorship

Lara Hogan has written very well about it in her Resilient Management book, and succinctly expressed in this tweet:

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Mentoring

Mentoring is how a Leader can actively teach skills to less experienced team members. And so, is the most important tool one can get access to earlier on one's career. Great Mentoring earlier on will yield far more capable and skilled team members in the future.

Earlier in my career I had no notion of how important this was, and the impact it could have on my future. Is hard to seek something when we don't know such a thing even exists. We simply don't know what we don't know.

So I would like to give this small insight to all of you who are starting this great and challenging career path.

Pen Pal

In these modern times many won't know what a Pen Pal is. Basically, people used to exchange hand written letters with each other. You could correspond with your Pal for years, or even a lifetime. Even now some people still practice this form of social interaction. And with our modern technology, some have taking it to email form.

The great thing about this practice is the asynchronous nature of it. You write a letter, post it, and wait for a reply. There is no expectation of instant notification or response, like you would have in a chat, or even email, situation.

Pen Pal Mentoring

Joining this two concepts and activities together, I thought it could be a great idea to Mentor people who are starting their careers in the Software industry, in a Pen Pal way.

This would be beneficial for both parties. For the Mentor, the opportunity to practice and hone its mentoring skills. For the Mentee, the opportunity to grow the skills required to succeed in this industry.

I would like to extend this offer to any "newbie" out there. If you are just starting, or only have a couple of years of experience under your belt, get in touch, maybe I can help you along the way. Leave me a comment, and we can get in touch!

Thanks for reading.

How do we Shape Up at Ambit

Nico S___ — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 22:59:26 +0000

Basecamp released last year their e-book on how they approach software development.

Shape UP is for product development teams who struggle to ship. Full of eye-opening insights, Shape Up will help you break free of "best practices" that aren't working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects.

It is a great reading that will yield many ideas and improvements to those who have the opportunity to work on their processes.

At Ambit we have evolved our Lean process to a place that resembles many of the Shape Up practices. Here is a write up of how we work.

Shape UP at Ambit

Pitch and Bets

It all starts with our Company strategy, set by the Board of Directors and Founders. This in turn drives the Product strategy, crafted by the CTO and senior management. As a result we have a Product Roadmap that gets constantly reviewed and prioritised to match any changes in strategy or business opportunities.

In this aspect we differ from Basecamp, and we have a more traditional "top-down" approach to Product priorities.

Shaping

This is the key aspect of our process. Each Roadmap Item (RMI) needs to be shaped in order for the work to be done.

When an RMI is created, the Product Manager, alongside with relevant team members, create a Problem Description for it. This Problem Description describes what we are trying to do and the value that we expect to bring to our customers. It describes what Success looks like for this RMI, and it also explicitly lists what is Out of Scope for it.

When the Problem Description is ready, we hand the RMI to a team member to lead the Shaping work. The team member (could be a developer, tester, designer, anybody, regardless of seniority or skills) will recruit the help of others to come with a Solution Design for the RMI.

The Solution Design covers all aspects of delivering a piece of software:

UX/UI design
Architecture design
Test plan
Release and operation plan
Adoption and marketing strategy
etc

Finally, we slice the RMI into individual Tasks that can be worked on by team members. We aim to apply the (INVEST)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_(mnemonic)] principles in our Tasks, so that the work can be continuously delivered.

Cycle

Here is another point where we differ from Basecamp, we work on a Lean Kanban approach.

Our RMI Tasks, after they are Shaped and sliced, go into our Kanban pipeline. This means we don't fix the time we are "allowed" to spend in a project.

We adapt the scope dynamically when needed, sometimes we cut things off, sometimes we change or add scope as we discover more information. I guess you could say that we try to keep this aspect agile.

Conclusions

Is very easy for teams to fall in the trap of applying a particular methodology "by the book". This is specially visible in the countless anecdotes of teams struggling with Scrum. Shape Up is no different in that regard.

Basecamp crafted this process to suit their needs, which is very likely different to yours. Certainly different to ours at Ambit. And this is the first and most important insight you should get from this article.

There are great tools, practices, and resources that can be used to craft the best possible process for our particular needs. The key is to keep evolving as the business, product, and team changes.

This at least how we see it at Ambit. I hope you enjoyed this article. I look forward to discussing it in the comments section!

Feed of posts for tags I'm following

Nico S___ — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 19:32:33 +0000

Hi DEV. I haven't been able to figure this out yet. How can I see a feed of posts that include the tags Im following?
Sometimes I wan't to see posts that have at least one tag I'm following, but not so interested in posts that don't have any tags I'm following.

Leadership in times of crisis

Nico S___ — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 06:33:23 +0000

As we enter uncharted waters in our workplaces, many delving into working remotely for the first time, we as leaders must step up to the circumstances and lead.

In these times of uncertainty we must ensure that we maintain an ongoing, open, and honest communication with and within our team.

Most of us are used to work colocated, where we can just pop up to a colleague's desk to ask a question or discuss a problem. And even though we have likely been using online chat applications like Slack, MS Teams, or the like, we know that those are not the right forums for nuanced conversations.

Everyday, as we have our daily forum (standup is a loaded word for me), I remind my team to jump on a video call to discuss the work at hand with each other. We have the tools to make this work, it's just a case of forming a new habit.

Forming habits, and breaking habits, is hard, so our job is to help our teams form the habits that will make them succeed in these times of crisis.

So what's the most important habit we need to help our teams develop?

COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION

How are you leading your team to succeed? I look forward to hear and learn from your insights!

Running One-on-One meetings remotely

Nico S___ — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 01:15:17 +0000

With the recent events worldwide, many have been put in a position that was potentially not even an option before, working remotely from home (WFH).

Some of us are lucky enough that WFH was already a reality, part or full time. So we already have mechanism and processes put in place to enable a good performance. But for those whom this is an out of the blue, brand new experience, things might not run so smoothly.

As a leader in my organization, it is one of my responsibilities to run frequent One-on-One (1on1) meetings with my team members. In them we discuss matters like current projects, career prospects, growth and learning opportunities, etc.

I still prefer, when possible, to run these kind of meetings in person. However, in our current situation, that might not be possible. What's important is that we don't disrupt or stop the flow of these very important interactions with our team members.

The way I approach running 1on1s remotely is by relying on good technology. Here are the different aspects, and associated products, I use to run mine.

Videoconferencing

It is very important that we can talk and see each other. We use a Google Meet, part of the Enterprise GSuite but now promised to all.

We also have a paid Slack account that allows us to have video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. This is very helpful too for other types of activities, like collaboration on tasks and projects.

Meeting Notes

As part of your 1on1s you should be sharing an agenda, the notes taking during the meeting, and track the actions that came of it.

We use 15five and I'm very happy with it. Besides the above mentioned needs to run 1on1s, it also offers all other manner of features regarding employee empowerment. Like 360 reviews, OKRs, etc.

But sometimes a simple shared document could be all that is needed. I recommend it to be in a format that can not only be shared, but co-authored as well. A 1on1 is a two-way communication process.

Conclusion

There is no one way to approach this, but it is good to share ideas and experiences.

This is how I'm managing mine, what are you doing on yours?