InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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Pandemic Shines Security Spotlight on Zoom Collaboration Risks
COVID-19 self-isolation has resulted in Zoom growing from 10m to 200m daily users. This has highlighted issues with Zoom's data privacy, security practices and meeting configurations. Bruce Schneier and other security commentators have provided insights into these issues. While governments and major companies have banned it, Zoom started a 90-day security hardening stint with former Facebook CSO.
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Looking after Mental Health and Wellbeing During COVID-19
In times of crisis such as what is happening around the world with COVID-19, anxiety, fear, sadness, anger and frustration are normal reactions and we need to accept that these emotions will happen without minimising or denying them. There are things which you can do to help overcome the stress; empathic responding is one way to positively deal with the stresses we all find ourselves under.
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How Team Interactions Help Kubernetes Adoption with Manuel Pais at QCon London
Manuel Pais talked at QCon London about how team interactions are vital to reduce cognitive load to have a successful adoption of Kubernetes. Pais recommends having a digital platform on top of Kubernetes. And, organizations can get started by assessing the team's cognitive load, defining a digital platform, and setting clear team interactions.
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Successful Remote Working
For both employees and employers, remote work requires intentional design and implementation to be effective. People find remote work challenging because the established mindset says that being in an office is how work gets done. Despite the challenges, when remote work is done well, the advantages to employees and employer are sufficient to make it worthwhile.
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Exploring Costs of Coordination During Outages with Laura Maguire at QCon London
Laura Maguire talked at QCon London about how the coordinative efforts during outages cause a high cognitive cost. Maguire found out that coordination during anomaly response is difficult, that existing models can undermine speedy resolution, and that the strategies to control the cost of coordination are adaptive to the type of incident. Moreover, tooling has additional costs of coordination.
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How to Debug Your Team: QCon London Q&A
Lisa van Gelder spoke about debugging your team at QCon London 2020, where she presented her toolkit for how to diagnose and address issues with a team’s pace of delivery. “It is all about ensuring they have mastery, autonomy, purpose and psychological safety”, she said. She uses that toolkit to introduce change to teams in a way that gets the buy-in from the team.
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How to Embrace “You Build It, You Run It” with Paul Hammant at QCon London
Paul Hammant talked at QCon London about having developers responsible for the first line of support in production, as the saying goes, “if you build it, you run it.” Hammant recommends following this practice only if there are proper support levels and escalation policies defined. As a result, companies could reduce the chances of burnout or staff quitting.
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How N26 Scales Technology through Hypergrowth
As N26 grew fast, they had to scale their technology to keep up. This meant scaling not only their infrastructure, but also their teams; for instance, they had to decide how to distribute work over teams and what technology to use or not use. Folger Fonseca, software engineer and Tech Lead at N26, shared his experience from scaling technology at N26 at QCon London 2020.
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Involving Engineers in Incident Management: QCon London Q&A
Learning from past incidents can increase engineers' confidence in handling live incidents and convincing them to join the on-call team. Samuel Parkinson spoke about how we can benefit from past incidents and encourage engineers to get involved in incident management at Qcon London 2020.
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DevOps beyond Development and Operations with Patrick Debois at QCon London
Patrick Debois talked at QCon London about thinking of DevOps beyond development and operation silos. DevOps is inherently complex, and there are other risks, challenges, and bottlenecks outside the software delivery pipeline where collaboration is vital, for instance, when collaborating with other groups like suppliers, HR, marketing, sales, finance, or legal.
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Trust in High Performing Teams: QCon London Q&A
High-performing teams flourish in a culture of trust and safety. It’s important that trust come both from within and outside of the team, in order to avoid isolating teams from their stakeholders. Stephen Janaway shared his experience with trust in high performing teams at Qcon London 2020.
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Remote Work Flourishes and Enables Business Continuity
Buffer.com and AngelList recently published the 2020 State of Remote Work survey results. The survey coincides with a report by the Wall Street Journal on a sudden boom in remote working within China. Remote work has enabled business continuity across companies like Alibaba, in response to mobility restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 virus.
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How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
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Effective Product Development for the 2020s
Ram Sivasankaran examined the market failures of Google’s social media attempts, Kodak and Blockbusters. His analysis identified slow adoption of technology, a lack of data-driven decision-making and low customer focus. Martin Reeves and Bill Lydon have also both written about a more competitive market in the 2020s, requiring the adoption of product strategies which embrace emergent technologies.
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Avoiding Loneliness as a Servant Leader
Team success is often celebrated without recognizing or acknowledging the role the servant leader has played. A lot of what they do can go undocumented or is not always visible to others. To avoid loneliness, servant leaders can create support networks to share what they do, celebrate successes with peers, blog about how they do it, and give demos to management about their accomplishments.