Week 41, 2024 - Assumptions and Learnings
Busiest week in a long time. I worked on an interesting assignment for a remote manager of managers position about resolving conflicts in an async culture. The most interesting part was the self-reflection I did after my first draft. As I was piling back the layers of my answer with a critical eye, I discovered that many of my judgments were based on assumptions, not facts. There were a lot of cool “whoa” realizations, followed by interesting “what if”s. I ended up writing six pages (which I would normally advise against), but fortunately, the company liked my approach.
We kicked off the second season of our podcast, The Retrospective, with a short retrospective about season one, and a discussion about the direction we plan to take this series in season two. It’s interesting to release something that was recorded months ago, but we’re catching up fast on old material. We have a new episode coming up next week, but our goal cadence is biweekly, publishing something new twice a month. Listen to S2E01 here.
📋 What I learned this week
I finished the Engineering Managers’ Guide to Effective Annual Feedback article I drafted last week. I always struggled with the duality of the yearly feedback process (which is coming up soon for most of you I assume). On the one hand, it's a huge time investment, and if done well, requires weeks to prepare and deliver over the regular day-to-day tasks. On the other hand, if done well, it can have a great positive impact on the individual (and by extension, on the team and the organization too). So I collected what I learned and tried to make a case for doing a proper job here.
I closed the door on my months-long Get Hired as an Engineering Manager series by adding relevant podcast episodes to the respective posts, and creating a summary page where I explain all the chapters, and allow users to download everything in a single PDF or EPUB file. Yes, I created my first Kindle book, which was an experience. I learned that EPUB is actually a ZIP file containing XHTML content — which explains why it’s such a dead-end to convert from PDF. Once I switched the import document format to DOCX, everything was much better looking. Still, I found it’s best to have Calibre (what a beast!) create the table of contents. The challenge was timeboxing all these works to one single day, and forcing myself to be OK with small aesthetic annoyances. You can download the final book here.
I spent 8 hours trying to install Proxmox on my 2013 MacBook Air. It was especially frustrating because a few months ago, I did something very similar with my Mac Mini, and that process was so straightforward that I don’t remember any details of it. To cut an agonizingly long story short, the difference was a seemingly insignificant one: last time I formatted my USB drive with Proxmox’s factory ISO, this time I used a Ventoy-formatted USB to boot the installer from the ISO file. That’s it, no other differences! Yet, this small thing somehow meant that this time there was an extra rdinit=/vtoy/vtoy parameter in my final GRUB config, halting the entire boot process (without any obvious error messages). Removing this parameter fixed the issue. (Ironically, I only found this thread after I figured the problem out by debugging GRUB, but I’m linking it for posterity.)
Another note for posterity: To keep the Air’s screen off and not suspend the laptop while the lid is closed, I modified /etc/systemd/logind.conf to ignore all HandleLidSwitch events and created a user with limited rights but no password that automatically logs in on the console upon reboot, and issues the command setterm --force blank. Yeah. It’s a bit icky to have a user logged in all the time, but I think I can live with that. Let me know if you have a more elegant solution though! (Helpful links: 1, 2.)
While working on a podcast episode, I learned about the JSON Chapters format, which specifies what time sections within an episode start. As a quick exercise, I wrote a simple converter that takes plaintext (that we can export from Descript) and transforms it to valid JSON according to the specification. With the help of Cursor’s LLM features, the whole project took an hour max. AI-assisted coding shines in these trivial tasks.
Finally, a lesson learned by not doing something. The other day I noticed what seemed like dust accumulating in the speaker holes of my MacBook Pro, and fortunately, before cleaning it with a brush or vacuum, I found this video. Turns out, most of these are not holes, but black-painted pits in the aluminum case! It seems that Apple chose form over function here.
🎯 What I want to try next week
I’m in multiple interview processes so I have to plan with lots of flexibility. Still, we’ve scheduled a podcast recording session, and I have a few article ideas I want to select one from and start working on it.
A USB3 external HDD case and a gigabit ethernet adapter should arrive next week, so as time allows, I’m planning to finish the old Air server setup and move over some of the VMs. (Yes, I managed to buy a 10/100 dongle in 2024. It was cheap and I didn’t pay attention. Paid for my lesson.)
🤔 Articles that made me think
Private Equity Ruins Tech Companies
I had the chance to watch from the first row what private equity ownership can do to a company, and we were lucky because at least it was not a leveraged buyout (as far as I know), the structure where the purchased company is used as a collateral to take out loans to finance the purchase itself, a corporate version of Baron Munchhausen pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair. If your company is being bought by a PE firm, know what to expect and brace yourself for tough months to come.
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
What should happen to a top-level domain when the corresponding country ceases to exist? Some historical context in the article, and the resulting strict rules that might destroy all .io addresses, according to the post. I’m not sure that’s going to happen though. If I had to bet, I’d say things are probably going to be fine. These transitions can take ages, and I can see one of the bigger companies using .io now just purchasing the TLD and maintaining it. It’s also ironic to read the warning for startup founders at the end of the article about wisely choosing their TLD, on a publication with a URL every.to.
Questions for potential employers
Carter Baxter’s extensive list of questions that interviewers can ask from employers. Job interviews are two-way streets, and a well-prepared list of questions can provide crucial information for a job seeker to rule out red flags and increase the chance of finding a good fit. Similarly, when I’m hiring, the quality and relevance of candidates’ questions can show curiosity and passion, two properties I’m usually searching for.
How to Draw a Strategy in 4 Easy Steps
A CTO’s journey in writing an Engineering Strategy. Two aspects I loved about this article (besides learning about Wardley maps): First, Ágoston didn’t just explain what was missing from his first attempts but also used the tool learned to make these omissions obvious. Second, he mentions that he has extensive cognitive data visualization expertise, and this was coming in handy in learning this new tool. I probably still have my Annual Feedback article in my head because it immediately clicked for me: this is a perfect example of using someone’s strengths to mitigate their weaknesses!
📻 Something cool: Episodes.fm
I love simple single-purpose services. Episodes.fm allows podcast creators to link to their episodes, which listeners can play on their favorite app. Once they make a selection, the site will always use the platform of their choice to start playback. That’s it, a super simple concept with smooth execution. No more awkward “listen on YouTube, Spotify, or your favorite app”.
That’s it for today, have some pizza this weekend,
Péter