The Leadership Garden Weekly - Rè nao

Rè nao (热闹) – The Chinese word rè nao is usually translated as ‘lively’ or ‘bustling,’ but its true meaning goes beyond these adjectives. It refers to a fun, lively place with an inviting vibe that makes you want to be there.

💡 This week’s food for thought: Everything seems simpler than it truly is when you are not the one working on it.

🐕‍🦺 Leadership

Story Points: Why is this so hard?

✋ Raise your hand if you’ve had a confusing or controversial experience with estimation. Story points are hard to understand and hard to use well. Ease your burden! All will be explained.

Prioritization is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem

Product and engineering leaders tend to be analytical, and we consider prioritization to be an algorithmic problem. Unfortunately, other execs see a different kind of problem...

We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work. Here are the results.

Literally, what it says in the title :) It’s not really an “analysis” but some simple stats. Interesting, nonetheless.

Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings

We all love to hate meetings, and honestly, sometimes it’s a company culture issue rather than an individual manager driving it.

Making operational work more visible

While working at Netflix, @norootcause initiated a new kind of meeting to retroactively look “over the shoulders” of fellow engineers and learn from their experiences.

💻 Tech

The Scoop: Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time

Hundreds of companies have no access to JIRA, Confluence, and OpsGenie. What can engineering teams learn from the poor handling of this outage?

A list of new(ish) command line tools

Upgrade your terminal toolbox with these command-line utilities – some new, some not so much.

1,000,000 Concurrent Connections

I hear the misconception that a server can only accept 65K connections or a server consumes a port for each accepted connection all the time. Let’s dispel this myth with an experiment.

PIPEFAIL: How a missing shell option slowed Cloudflare down

Between 20:10 and 20:40 UTC on December 16, 2021, web requests served by Cloudflare were artificially delayed by up to five seconds before being processed. This post tells the story of how a missing shell option called “pipefail” slowed Cloudflare down.