I’ve been a SquareSpace customer for a couple of years now, having decided to restart my blogging efforts. I initially chose SquareSpace as I wanted a simple, hosted option so that I could concentrate on writing rather than configuring web servers.

I liked the ease with which I could get started with SquareSpace, and I was impressed with the templates and designs that I could choose from. I wasn’t that impressed with the post editor, but it seemed better than most of the alternatives at the time.

Whilst SquareSpace had been a good way of getting started, I became increasingly frustrated by the editor and layout tools for writing blog posts. I also realised that I wanted more of a blog “feel” for the site, and in my opinion, the best blogging tool out there is WordPress.

I started the move earlier this week by exporting the content from SquareSpace and importing it all to a new hosted WordPress.com site. After some tweaking of templates and design, I had something I was happy with, so I switched on the new stevebennett.co domain. I still have steve.codes, but feel the new domain is more appropriate.

I had a problem though. I had content and links referencing the old steve.codes blog, and needed to redirect this to my new site. There was no clear way to do this in the WordPress.com instance, so I needed to set up a tactical hack to do the redirect.

The “hack” involved setting up a new free-tier Cloudflare account. Cloudflare’s free tier gives you limited DDOS and CDN capabilities, but the only thing I really needed was access to their “Page Rules”, specifically the Redirect capability.

After pointing the steve.codes domain to the Cloudflare nameservers, I was able to set up two new Page Rules for redirecting existing content to the new WordPress site.

Two rules needed to be added, one to redirect the blog content, under '/blog/', and another to cover all other content. Luckily, my blog on SquareSpace used the same slug format – yyyy/mm/dd – as used by WordPress.com, making the rules much simpler.

Once added, all existing links to steve.codes were successfully redirect to the new WordPress site, and the migration was complete.

Overall moving from SquareSpace to WordPress was incredibly simple, and I’m pleased with the new site.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently reworking our career paths. Our current documents are heavily based on the work by Radford, which defines 6 levels for each job family. Whilst our career path was very well defined and comprehensive, we are finding that the documentation is a little incomprehensible and causes difficulty as people try to self-assess their position on the career path.

Through conversations about this, it’s clear our team members want something simpler against which they could measure their progress and plan their development. This is one of my key tasks for the coming weeks, and I’ll drawing inspiration from the many public career paths that exist, such as the one from Rent the Runway.

In the meantime, in conversations with our engineers I’ve found myself boiling down the career path to a few key competencies. Two of these are impact and influence, and I’d like to focus on these here.

As I talked about the changes in expectations across I have for the impact people have, and the influence they exert across the levels, I found I need for a visual aid. So, I took to drawing a set of concentric circles on the whiteboard to demonstrate my arguments.

We start from the centre of this diagram, where we find our entry level engineers (Engineer I), and slightly further out our Engineer II’s. At these levels, your impact and influence is expected to be on an individual level, as you use your new and existing skills to be a competent individual contributor and collaborative team member. Your focus here is on growing as an engineer, taking opportunities to learn and develop new skills.

Moving outwards, our Senior Engineers are expected to have impact and influence over their individual scrum and delivery teams. At this level, you’ll be expected to be co-ordinating others to solve problems and motivate the team to achieving their goals. To do this, there’s an expectation that you’ll need to have achieved a strong base of knowledge in our products and in at least one of key technologies.

Looking to our Staff Engineer circle, this is the first time your influence and impact starts to transcend your immediate team. Here you’ll be expected to be defining the approach for not only your delivery team, but also starting to influence other members within your own discipline. For example, as a Staff Test Engineer, you could be helping to define the approach to testing RESTful services across the group.

In the Principal Engineer circle, you’ll be starting to change the agenda for the engineering group. This will involve working across boundaries of disciplines or delivery teams to define processes, practices and behaviours or to deliver large pieces of work co-ordinating amongst several groups. Alternatively, as a Principal Engineer you could be the one using specialist knowledge to solve particularly sticky issues for teams.

Finally, at the edge of the diagram we find out Distinguished Engineers. At this level, engineers are supporting technology initiatives at a company or industry level. Your impact and influence is no longer limited by the boundaries of the company, and you use your skills to drive significant change to not only the company, but also to the wider industry.

I’ve found this 5 circles approach as a good way of showing the expectations at each level in a way which is simple and understandable. It clearly shows the differences between each level, and gives people a lens with which they can better understand their own position on the career path.

In doing some research for this piece, I was pleased to see other companies use similar mechanisms to describe the progression through an engineering career path. One such example is Spotify whose process is described in “Spotify Technology Career Path”.

I believe that one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to own your mistakes. Nobody is perfect, and therefore it’s inevitable that you will make mistakes. Often, holding a leadership or management position means that these mistakes are magnified and have a impact on many more people.

So why admit your mistakes?
Wouldn’t this be showing a weakness? Wouldn’t it show that your infallible? Won’t people judge you closer? Surely, you’ll lose their trust and respect.

In fact, in my experience I’ve found the exact opposite to be true. Being able to admit to your mistakes creates the impression of a more confident leader, gives you the freedom to take more risks and helps foster a culture of trust and respect.

Building trust

In the “5 Dysfunctions of a Team”, Patrick Lencioni describes the common issues which lead to team failure. The base of this pyramid is “absence of trust”. Lencioni goes onto explain that individuals need to achieve vulnerable trust, a trust that the intentions of their peers are good which in turn gives people the freedom to express different opinions or ideas.

“As desirable as this may be, it is not enough to represent the kind of trust that is characteristic of a great team. It requires team members to make themselves vulnerable to one another, and be confident that their respective vulnerabilities will not be used against them. The vulnerabilities I’m referring to include weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings, mistakes and requests for help.

As ‘soft’ as all of this might sound, it is only when team members are truly comfortable being exposed to one another that they begin to act without concern for protecting themselves. As a result, they can focus their energy and attention completely on the job at hand, rather than on being strategically disingenuous or political with one another.”

Owning your mistakes will act as a catalyst for building trust in your teams. By going first and showing your vulnerability, you implicitly give permission to others to do the same. Building vulnerable trust creates a basis for better decision making and team-work, as described by Lencioni.

Building accountability

When you’re accountable for a decision, you’re the person who’s responsible for explaining the reasoning behind those decisions. Many people are afraid of taking accountability as they fear the consequences of getting something wrong. By freely admitting your mistakes, you show that being accountable for something isn’t a position which people should fear.

Removing the fear encourages others to make themselves accountable for decisions. When this happens, decisions get driven down to the lowest rank in the organisation and as a consequence the cohesion between the group improves and your role as a leader changes to that of an enabler. You move from the person making all the decisions to the person who continually improves the understanding of the context within which decisions are made so that others can make those decisions.

As more individuals take accountability the organisation grows with greater autonomy and empowerment. Due to the strong correlation between autonomy and motivation, this has a positive affect on the happiness, engagement and motivation of the group. The sharing of accountability also improves organisational efficiency as you remove yourself as a bottleneck to decision making.

Building a culture of experimentation and learning

A team that isn’t experimenting and learning is a team that is destined for mediocrity, and eventually will be a team that fails. There’s a lovely quote which sums this up.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Whilst “getting what you’ve always got” might have been a reasonable way to do business in the past, the increased pace of change and lower barriers to entry mean that continuing with the status quo is likely to result in you or your industry being disrupted.

To stave off the possibility of something like this hitting your business you need to continue to innovate and experiment. The process of successful innovation and experimentation is built upon the shared understanding that most experiments will fail. All innovation carries a degree of risk, and it’s unlikely that anyone will be willing to address this risk in a culture that doesn’t tolerate failure.

Owning your mistakes shows that when failure occurs, it’s addressed and celebrated as an opportunity to learn from. Building this learning culture will encourage innovation and experimentation within the team. People will be more willing to take risks, knowing that the consequences of getting something wrong won’t result in career limiting repercussions.

Enabling this learning loop in the organisation will also give the tools to make better decisions in the future. Someone that can realise when they make a mistake, admit to it, and then learn from it becomes a powerful agent for change within an organisation. The act of making mistakes and surviving them adds to our experience of handling situations, which can be drawn upon the next time a similar decision point is reached.

Owning your mistake

Those are the reasons why admitting to your mistakes is a good thing to do, so next we should address how you handle this situation when it inevitably occurs (and it will, no-one is infallible).

Your reaction to your own mistakes will have an impact on the way your organisation culture develops. When the time comes, you need to step up, and be honest about your mistake. Apologise, resisting the natural urge to excuse yourself by attempting to explain your rationale. Also, don’t look to blame someone else – you need to show accountability.

Importantly, follow up your apology with a clear plan showing how you’ve learnt, and how you’ll correct the situation or ensure you don’t end up making the same mistake again.

Last week, I hosted a talk at our department all-hands. During one session, I needed to talk about a new team being set up in the group. I’d had feedback that my approach in building this new team lacked transparency which in turn enabled the rumour mill to go into overdrive.

I opened this talk with an apology for the lack of clarity and transparency in staffing the new team. Following the all-hands, I was stopped by one of our engineers who gave me feedback that it was one of the first times that he’d seen a leader admit a mistake, and that in doing so I’d shown my authenticity. He also offered himself up to help me in opening up decision making more. Had I taken another route, either by denying the issue, attempting to explain it away or worse of all, thrown someone else under the bus, I’d doubt that anything else I said that day would have been heard.

Choosing the “best tool for the job” is a mantra that many software engineers repeat when asked to explain their choice of tool, language or framework. In some cases, this choice is right, however far too many times in my career I’ve seen “best tool for the job” loosely translate to whatever was top of Hacker News this week.

The unintended consequence of always choosing the “best tool for the job” is a software inventory which spans multiple languages, frameworks, build systems and deployment tooling. The fractured ecosystem of development occurs as each developer or team makes their decision in isolation, only considering their immediate consequence. The silos and diverse technology stack reduces the opportunity for reuse, leading to teams reinventing boiler plate code for testing, monitoring, instrumentation, and perhaps even business logic.

In this environment products become harder to evolve, developers struggle to move between teams and the bus factor quickly tends towards one. Running systems become harder to maintain as the idiosyncrasies of each language run-time needs to be understood, leading to more specialists needing to be on-call. Containerisation and 12-factor apps (itself a kind of Sensible Default) have helped, but as anyone who has been on-call will tell you having a good understanding of the apps running is invaluable when the worst happens.

A recent medium post by Ozan Onay, ”You are not Google”, shows another side to the “best tool” argument, rightly pointing out that you probably don’t need that cool new tech you’re proposing. Often a technology which is “good enough” really is good enough for your domain. There’s no need to go further.

I believe that teams can overcome these issues by employing Sensible Defaults. A Sensible Default is a practice, language, framework or tool adopted as the default choice for an engineering team. It’s the commonly agreed approach to building products, and the first thing to consider when starting a new project, or when there’s a new problem to solve.

As an example, you may decide to use React for your Sensible Default for front-end development, Flask and Python for building web services, and PostgreSQL as your database technology.

Notice, I’m not saying it’s the only choice, it’s just your default. Engineers are still empowered to choose other technology where necessary, but alternatives need to be justified in relation to their advantages over the Sensible Default.

I’m not the only one that sees the advantage in having defaults. In 2014, Ben Vinegar wrote a medium post about how “The best tool for the job, isn’t always” where he describes the reasons for standardization whilst he was at Disqus.

So, whilst it may feel restrictive, and at odds with everything you’ve read about motivation and autonomy, I believe that more teams should embrace the power of Sensible Defaults.

Documenting your Sensible Defaults

The choice for the Sensible Default is one that should be carefully considered, both in relation to the technical problems it will need to solve and the skills in the organisation. A Sensible Default choice has wider ranging impacts that just the local team, so the candidates for the default need to be assessed against different scenarios aside and with the wider team. I’m not going to go into the process of making technology choices, as this topic probably deserves it’s own blog post, but I do want to comment on how decisions should be documented.

In agile environments, decisions around architecture and technology have a habit of being lost especially as teams move to more evolutionary ideas of architecture development. The motivations and context behind decisions become difficult to track, and it becomes difficult for team members, both new and existing, to keep track of them as projects develop.

Therefore, once debated, discussed and dissected, technology choices that become the Sensible Default should be documented for future reference, using something like Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

By keeping a versioned record of Sensible Defaults the team not only have a repository when new developers can learn about the development environment, they also have a set of records which provide details of the decisions for later review as the context changes.

It’s likely that you already have a number of Sensible Defaults in your organisation. For example, you may have settled on Java for building web services, and you may find that most of your web services have been developed using Spring Boot. If this is a case, run a fit-for-purpose assessment on the technology in use and document your new Sensible Defaults.

Deviations from the default

Whilst the Sensible Default should be the first choice, it’s not intended to be the only choice. Engineers can deviate from the default, providing it’s a considered decision.

When describing this concept to people, I often use the analogy of a fairground ride height restrictions. Good architecture decisions are based on clear system requirements, both functional and non-functional. A Sensible Default decision builds on these requirements by adding a set of people based requirements such as cross-skilling and training. This list of requirements is the bar a new technology must get over in order to be considered for use.

There’s always a cost to introducing a new technology, and anyone wishing to do so must provide details on how they plan to educate the rest of the engineering team. They can defer this cost, by limiting the scope of the training to those directly working with the new tech, yet in doing so, they carry the risk and burden of supporting the project until the technology is more widely known.

This may seem a little unfair on the team that wants to experiment, however it helps to increase the bus-factor within the wider team, and helps to reduce the chances of a single point of failure developing who is more prone to burn-out.

Deviations from the Sensible Default should also be stored in ADRs, with the relevant context and discussion that lead to the deviation. Storing decisions in this manner help teams avoid repeating conversations and re-debating choices when new team members join, or teams change. They also provide useful information for future maintainers of a project.

The number of deviations should be kept to a minimum. Should the number of deviations continually grow, it’s probably time to consider whether the Sensible Default is the right one.

Encouraging experimentation

Many times when I explain the concept of Sensible Defaults, I’m challenged by engineers who believe that by setting defaults I’m reducing the scope of innovation and experimentation. It’s a fair challenge, and I believe that it’s important that new technology is evaluated and considered for use, lest a team end up with difficult to maintain legacy software that is hard to recruit new team members for.

To ensure a team doesn’t end up in this situation, I encourage the use of innovation or free development time. During this time, engineers are free to use whatever technology they like to build non-mission critical applications. This is the space to experiment with the new deployment technology, or JavaScript framework which Hacker News is blowing up with this week.

By using new technology to build real-world applications, automation and tools that help improve engineering efficiency, engineers make it past the “getting started” tutorials and start to understand how the technology works in a production-like environment. Achieving this level of experience with a technology means that the debate over it’s uses can reference existing applications, rather than just replaying the top comments and opinions from the blogosphere.

From chaos to cohesion

Whilst engineers are comfortable adhering to standards (see arguments over the correct use of HTTP methods and status codes in RESTful web services as an example), when it comes to choosing technology, the drive to use the newest technology coupled with the move to service based architectures often leads to a somewhat chaotic and overly complex development environment.

I hope that I’ve shown here that by employing critical technology review and documenting the results as Sensible Defaults, engineering organisations improve their operational efficiency and resilience. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

However, Sensible Defaults are just that – defaults. They’re the first choice, not the only choice, and deviations are still possible, providing we make these choices consciously.

We can use innovation time and non-mission critical development for experimentation, helping to ensure that the development team has the opportunity to learn about new technology in a production-like environment.

Finally, I’d like to close with a quote I found whilst researching this blog post. Whilst the post it comes from doesn’t talk about software, I feel it sums up the need for Sensible Defaults well.

Sensible defaults can reduce friction and provide simplicity anywhere one can think to apply them. They are the bedrock of minimalist practice and a quiet mind.
@patrickhone – Sensible Defaults

I was fortunate enough to spend the last couple of days at Lead Developer 2017 in London. The conference has been described as a leadership and management conference dressed up as a technical conference. It’s one of my “must-attend” conferences of the year.

There were some clear themes from the talks this year, with perhaps the strongest message coming across that as technical leads and managers it’s own responsibility to build safe, inclusive environments where people can thrive. Carly Robinson delivered her excellent talk on “Mentoring Junior Employeers at Slack HQ” which included references to the importance of a supportive environment for entry-level developers. Also on this theme, Jill Wetzler used empirical evidence in her talk “Tips for Building Diverse Teams” to show the issues that under-represented people face in STEM environments.

Another key themes was the need for leaders to be deliberate in the way they communicate. Adrian Howard showed how lessons learnt from conducting user research can be applied to your one-on-ones in his talk “How to Talk to Earthlings”, Katherine Wu (“Ask v Guess Cultures”) and Mathias Meyer (“Building and Scaling a Distributed and Inclusive Team
“) both talked about the impact of culture on communication, and Erika Carlson gave the audience a set of clear actionable techniques for improving giving and receiving feedback in her talk “Better: Fearless Feedback for Software Teams”. I’m really looking forward to this video being available to rewatch and share with my teams.

Lara Hogan put a different spin on the leader’s role in communication, wrapping up the conference with “Leading by Speaking” which gave advice on building and delivering a great speaking performance when under the spotlight. I found this a great way to round off the conference and the next book on my reading list is Lara Hogan’s book Demystifying Public Speaking.

Aside from these key themes, I found Cate Huston’s talk on mobile application development (“YOLO Releases Considered Harmful”) particularly relevant to me. In the last year I’ve moved from web application development (YOLO Dev), into the world on packaged software where you don’t own the update cycle and process. The majority of talks at conferences have the inbuilt assumption that audience are building web applications and I found it good to see someone talking about a different (more relatable to me) set of challenges.

Finally, I couldn’t complete a field report without mentioning Nickolas Means’s talk on “The Original Skunk Works” at Lockhead Martin. Nickolas told the audience of the struggles engineers encountered in building supersonic jets, with very little resources and to tight timescales. He showed that the lessons from Lockhead Martin and “Kelly’s rules” are practices that are applicable to software development, and the way we build teams. Nickolas has a fantastic ability to tell a story, and I’d recommend taking the time to hunt out some of his previous talks.

This was the third year of Lead Dev in London, and my third year in attending. Each year the content has got better, and each year I come away with new ideas and techniques to apply. What’s more, I come away with verification that I’m doing the right things, and to put it the way of one of the speakers – “this is my tribe”.

Leadership and management is a craft. Moving from a senior developer to a technical manager is a career shift, not a promotion. Events like Lead Dev give me a chance to interact with others who have reset their career and to continue hone my craft. It also gives me the chance to hear about the challenges that others face and build out a network of folks going through similar things to myself.

Lead Dev London 2018 was announced (although no dates yet), along with further events in New York and Austin. More information about the conference, including speaker bios, schedule and event notification can be found on the Lead Dev website.