Leadership tech debt

This week on the https://refactoring.fm/ community a member asked the difference between a good Engineering manager and an exceptional Engineering manager. In the conversations that followed someone suggested that "a good manager leads the team, a great manager creates a team of leaders". That immediately reminded me of how in Turn the ship around, the author Captain L. David Marquet argues that leaders’ performance should be measured by how their reports perform after the leader has left.

A few days later I was listening to the Knowledge Project podcast (I usually listen to most episodes two or three times to make sure I can get all the knowledge), and I made the connection of the above to tech debt. Someone who is a good leader but is required/essential for the performance of his reports is the transposition of code tech debt in the organization hierarchy.
The organization trades going further in the long term for going fast in the now.

Touch points between the two situations:

  1. leave the code/organization better than you found it
  2. be willing to slow down now to be able go further later vs be willing to look like a fool now while you build and grow the org competency and autonomy
  3. they're both a form of risk. We should in fact call tech debt tech risk instead, because most C-suite stakeholders see debt (i.e. financial) differently than risk, and tech debt is really closer to financial risk than financial debt


Popular posts

A not so short guide to ZFS on Linux

Image
Updated Oct 16 2013: shadow copies, memory settings and links for further learning. Updated Nov 15 2013: shadow copies example, samba tuning. Unless you've been living under a rock you should have by now heard many stories about how awesome ZFS is and the many ways it can help with saving your bacon . The downside is that ZFS is not available (natively) for Linux because the CDDL license under which it is released is incompatible with the GPL. Assuming you are not interested in converting to one of the many Illumos distributions or FreeBSD this guide might serve you as a starting point if you are attracted  by ZFS features but are reluctant to try it out on production systems. Basically in this post I note down both the tought process and the actual commands for implementing a fileserver for a small office. The fileserver will run as a virtual machine in a large ESXi host and use ZFS as the filesystem for shared data.
Read more

Indexing Apache access logs with ELK (Elasticsearch+Logstash+Kibana)

Image
Who said that grepping Apache logs has to be boring? Sample of dashboard that can be created with ELK. Pretty impressive, huh? The truth is that, as Enteprise applications move to the browser too, Apache access logs are a gold mine, it does not matter what your role is: developer, support or sysadmin. If you are not mining them you are most likely missing out a ton of information and, probably, making the wrong decisions. ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) is a terrific, Open Source stack for visually analyzing Apache (or nginx) logs (but also any other timestamped data).
Read more

Mirth: recover space when mirthdb grows out of control

I was recently asked to recover a mirth instance whose embedded database had grown to fill all available space so this is just a note-to-self kind of post. Btw: the recovery, depending on db size and disk speed, is going to take long. The problem A 1.8 Mirth Connect instance was started, then forgotten (well neglected, actually). The user also forgot to setup pruning so the messages filled the embedded Derby database until it grew to fill all the available space on the disk. The SO is linux. The solution First of all: free some disk space so that the database can be started in embedded mode from the cli. You can also copy the whole mirth install to another server if you cannot free space. Depending on db size you will need a corresponding amount of space: in my case a 5GB db required around 2GB to start, process logs and then store the temp files during shrinking. Then open a shell as the user that mirth runs as (you're not running it as root, are you?) and cd in
Read more