InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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The Path to a Staff-Plus Engineer Role: from Management Back to Tech
When working in tech, a managerial career may not be for you. Fabiane Bizinella Nardon went from being a manager back to tech, becoming a staff plus engineer and creating a staff plus friendly company. She presented A CTO That Still Codes: My Tortuous Path to the Staff Plus Engineer Role at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Becoming an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer
To increase your effectiveness as a staff-plus engineer, it can help to develop your communication, listening, technical strategy, and networking skills. Blanca Garcia Gil presented Five Behaviours to Become an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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Remain in Tech by Becoming a Staff Plus Engineer
Engineers who want to remain focused on tech can follow the path toward a staff plus engineer. Staff plus engineers enable others to have impact. Bringing the people along can be hard; you need to work on your communication and influential skills. Nicky Wrightson presented The Secret Strategy for Landing That Staff Engineer Role at QCon London 2022 and will present at QCon Plus May 10-20, 2022.
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How Open Source Can Pave the Path Towards a Staff+ Role
Open source contributions and long-term community engagement can help you on your path to a staff+ engineer role. Written communication skills are key for the async and remote work which is common in open source. Your contributions should be aligned with business needs, which can give you visibility that opens up career possibilities. Alex Porcelli presented at QCon London 2022.
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How Software Affects Climate Change, and What Software Engineers Can Do about It
There are huge amounts of software running everywhere on the planet - and this software consumes energy when it is running. Unfortunately most of the energy world-wide is still being produced by burning fossil fuels. Software engineers can improve the software so that it uses less energy to do its job, then less energy needs to be produced by burning fossil fuels, which is better for the climate.
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Becoming a Staff Plus Engineer: Leadership and Communication Training Matters
The poor industry support for engineers who want to pursue a technical career affects them; many outstanding technical individuals find themselves forced to seek a management position. The path to a staff plus engineer role is not straightforward. Training on leadership and communication for staff plus engineers can help them to become a better tech leader.
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CircleCI Report Finds Successful Software Teams are Larger and Test Extensively
CircleCI - a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform - has released the findings from their 2022 State of Software Delivery Report. The report reveals that the most successful software delivery teams are larger, use extensive testing, and prioritise being ready to deploy.
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Improving Software Quality with Gamification
Bingo Bongo sessions for bug hunting and playing risk storming games can improve quality. Gamification supports learning, can make everyday work interesting, and strengthen team spirit. Playing games should be part of the daily work at the office and seen as an effective work time. In gamification, a real value is created by the creative process.
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Five Behaviours of Successful Staff Plus Engineers
Staff plus engineers act as technical leaders to have a bigger impact. Their ability to get things done goes beyond their individual capacity to grow and mentor others. The tech industry has moved away from thinking that engineers work individually and collaboration is one of the most important behaviours in a staff plus role.
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Infinite Representations: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Developers can face impossible things in their daily work. It’s impossible to directly represent infinity or to hold infinite precision on a discrete physical computer. Storage and representations are bounded. Ignoring or being unaware of this impossibility can lead to bugs or systems behaving differently than expected. Kevlin Henney gave the keynote Six Impossible Things at QCon London 2022.
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Scaling and Automating Microservice Testing at Lyft
Lyft used cloud-based isolated environments for several purposes, including end-to-end testing. As the number of microservices increased, tests using these environments became harder to scale and lost value. Recent articles describe how Lyft shifted to testing using request isolation in a shared staging environment and used acceptance tests to gate production deployments.
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Using Team-Set Salaries for Company-Wide Compensation
Team-set salaries (TSS) can be scaled up by doing appraisals across teams where results are automatically calibrated. The scores indicate where conversations are needed. TSS encourages people to learn new skills and adapt.
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Developer Experience at Lyft: from the Cloud to Local Environments
Lyft engineering finished their decomposition of a monolith into a collection of microservices back in 2018. Modular development environments using Docker containers eventually moved to the cloud. Recent articles describe how their development tooling struggled to keep up as time passed and the number of microservices exploded. Development environments had to return to the engineer’s machine.
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Creating Tight Cohesive Tech Teams for Women to Thrive
Women in tech need a dynamic, valuing team, stimulating work, push and support, local role models, nonjudgmental flexibility, and personal power. Tight cohesive teams can provide high-quality interactions, making people feel valued.
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Measuring the Environmental Impact of Software and Cloud Services
Software has an influence on the limitation of the service life or the increased energy consumption. It’s possible to measure the environmental impacts that are caused by cloud services. The design of the software architecture determines how much hardware and electrical power is required. Software can be economical or wasteful with hardware resources.