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Skill Frameworks, Maker’s Schedule, Ship/Show/Ask reviews💡

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💡 Monday Ideas

Skill Frameworks, Maker’s Schedule, Ship/Show/Ask reviews💡

Monday 3-2-1 — Edition 47

Luca Rossi
Apr 24, 2023
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Skill Frameworks, Maker’s Schedule, Ship/Show/Ask reviews💡

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Hey, Luca here! Welcome to the Monday 3-2-1 ✨

Every Monday I will send you an email like this with 3 short ideas about engineering management, technical strategy, and good hiring.

You will also receive the regular long-form one on Thursday, like the last one:

  • How I Write and Grow Refactoring in 2023 ✏️

To receive all the full articles and support Refactoring, consider subscribing if you haven’t already!

Get full access to Refactoring today ✨

p.s. you can learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here.



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Back to this week’s ideas 👇


1) 🪜 Developing an Engineering Skill Framework

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Andy Scheff, CTO and Founder at Practica, in a community event.

Andy and his team recently created an industry-standard framework for the skills and careers of software engineers. They built it using input from successful companies like Square, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Etsy, and more.

Here is the full video interview 👇

During the chat we talked extensively about such frameworks, how to create them, roll them out, keep them updated, the role of coaching in engineering, and more!

We are going to run more of these events in the future, held as interviews + live Q&A with community members. If you like them and want to join, you can subscribe to the full version of Refactoring to get access to the community! 🤗

I also wrote about career frameworks myself, in a recent Refactoring article 👇

Refactoring
Career Frameworks — Part 1 🪜
This week we dive into one of my all-time most requested topics: career frameworks! I spent a good chunk of the last month doing research, talking with guys in the community, and reflecting on my own personal experience. It was a ton of work, because this topic is massive. Over time I received all kinds of questions about it: from founders who are in the process of creating such a framework for the first time, to engineers who want to use it for growth, to hiring managers who struggle to keep it up to date…
Read more
a year ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Luca Rossi

2) ⚖️ Maker’s Schedule / Manager’s Schedule

My favorite Paul Graham essay is probably Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule. In it, he explains the radical difference between the two types of work:

  • 🔨 As a Maker — you benefit from long, uninterrupted streaks of time where you do your focus work.

  • 👔 As a Manager — your schedule is run by meetings and interactions where you make decisions that drive the work of your team forward.

This difference is experienced sometimes brutally by folks who move from IC to management roles. These schedules, in fact, are not only very different — they are incompatible.

As a Manager, you won't ever benefit again from such streaks of focus time to do your maker work. Likewise, as a Maker, you shouldn't be bothered with too many meetings, because that would come at the expense of your productivity.

I wrote more about the duties and skills of managers and engineers in a previous Refactoring article 👇

Refactoring
How Technical Should Managers Be? 🧑‍💻
A few weeks ago we ran a live event in the Refactoring community where we invited some very accomplished engineering coaches. The event unfolded as a group coaching session, where the coaches covered all kinds of questions and real-life problems from members of the community…
Read more
a year ago · 13 likes · Luca Rossi

3) Ship / Show / Ask 🚢

Should code reviews be always blocking and mandatory? 🤔

If reviews are for 1) improving quality, and 2) sharing knowledge, do all changes have room for improvement, or bring new knowledge to share?

I am a fan of the Ship/Show/Ask framework, by Rouan Wilsenach, which considers three cases 👇

1) 🚢 Ship

You make the change directly on your mainline, without asking for a code review. This works when you fix unremarkable bugs, add features using established patterns, or do collateral changes like improving docs.

2) 🔍 Show

You create a PR, run CI, merge it without anyone’s approval, and then ask for feedback. This way you deploy quickly but still create space for discussion.

It works when you want to share knowledge but don’t need much feedback, or the feedback may not be blocking.

3) ❓ Ask

You make changes to a branch, open a PR and wait for the review before merging. This is the standard process most companies adopt nowadays.

This framework is about choosing every time what is the best strategy, based on the type of change you are making. It encourages active reflection instead of adopting always the same pattern.

In my professional life I have pretty much always worked in Ask mode. I am not comfortable with Ship mode unless we are talking of really small, negligible changes. However, I see how the Show pattern is a good way to get the best of both worlds in many scenarios.

You can find more ideas about good code review processes in this Refactoring article:

Refactoring
Code Reviews 🔍
Shipping fast and often is the #1 element shared by top performing engineering teams. Elite teams release multiple times a day, and it takes less than one hour to go from code committed to code successfully running in production. This idea was made popular in 2018 by the…
Read more
2 years ago · 39 likes · 3 comments · Luca Rossi

💻 Typo

Last week we talked about Typo, which is a smart tool to help engineering teams code better, deploy faster, and stay aligned with their goals.

If you missed it, as a Refactoring reader, you can still get 30% off any Typo plan 👇

Learn more about Typo ✨


And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these:

1) ✉️ Subscribe to the newsletter — if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here.

Get full access to Refactoring today ✨

2) ❤️ Share it — Refactoring lives thanks to word of mouth. Share the article with your team or with someone to whom it might be useful!

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I wish you a great week! ☀️

Luca

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Skill Frameworks, Maker’s Schedule, Ship/Show/Ask reviews💡

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Skill Frameworks, Maker’s Schedule, Ship/Show/Ask reviews💡

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John Crickett
Writes Coding Challenges
Apr 24Liked by Luca Rossi

I like the ship, show, ask approach for PRs, too often they're adding friction for no good reason.

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1 reply by Luca Rossi
Brad & Butter
Apr 24·edited Apr 24

Makers and manager sounds like these two concepts https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/maker-studio-manager-studio https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/clock-time-event-time/

If managers strategize by clock time in 20-year projects (e.g. FAANG from startup to giants), and makers operate by event time in 5-year projects (e.g. FOSS "pet" projects)... what does that leave the "tech lead" in 10-year product tactical maneuvers (e.g. digital transformation)?

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