Ideas and resources for staying technical as engineering managers
From How to Keep Up Your Technical Skills as a Manager presented at O'Reilly Velocity Conference, San Jose, June 2018
Check out other ideas and add your own on Twitter at #managerswhotech
- Book daily/weekly work calendar slots
- Book daily/weekly personal calendar slots
- Schedule a class and invite others
- Commit to giving a talk (brown bag, conference)
- Prioritize workshops over presentations
- Capitalize on sporadic nights and/or weekends
- Meetups
- Company hackathons
- Read all design docs
- Set up the dev environment; deploy
- Code review (non blocking)
- Build prototypes on local
- Pair program
- Encourage team brown bags for new learnings
- Encourage code walkthroughs
- Offer to do load or diffy testing
- Remove/delete dead code
- Set up "labs" environment for non-blocking work and experimentation (contributed by Refael Botbol )
- Set up system health dashboards
- Set up queries for success metrics
- Write scripts (Python, Google App Scripts)
- Build chrome extensions (ex: recruiting)
- Bots (Slack, Alexa skills, IFTTT)
- Build interview questions, solutions, rubrics
- Third-party software integrations (Jira/Tableau)
- Give a conference talk or brown bag about a side project
- Participate in hackathons (company or outside)
- Contribute to open source
- Write posts for your tech blog (contributed by Refael Botbol )
- Volunteer at code camps and meetups
- Tutor your kids, niece, friends’ kids
- Take a class (set yourself a cadence)
- Read a new technology book
- Attend conferences
- Read tech blogs, listen to tech podcasts
- Twitter Engineering Blog (https://blog.twitter.com/engineering)
- [Github Blog] (https://blog.github.com/)
- Check other company engineering blogs
- [Top 16 DevOps blogs you should be reading] (https://apiumhub.com/tech-blog-barcelona/devops-blogs/)
- [Software Lead Weekly Newsletter] (http://softwareleadweekly.com/)
- [The Ulitmate List of Developer Podcasts] (https://simpleprogrammer.com/ultimate-list-developer-podcasts/)
- Tool demos from third party providers
- Slack channels (Rands #architecture, #tech-chat)
- [Rands Leadership Slack] (http://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/)
- Move from specialist to generalist
- Take on a project in unfamiliar territory
- Manage a team in a new technical domain
- Consider the IC/manager pendulum
- [The engineer/manager pendulum] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/
- Take a learning sabbatical
- Alternate between startups and large companies
- Try reciprocal mentoring relationships