Quite recently I've shared my personal interpretation of "seniority" in tech (based on the concept of "leverage" - shamelessly stolen from Andy Grove ...). This term ("seniority") is frequently closely associated (as an enabler) to the role of an "architect" - which is another topic I use to share my thoughts about from time to time. So far I've been depicting an architect as: a navigatora technical product ownera person accountable for 1 of 3 pillars in the concept of "triumvirate of power"But there's one more personal lesson about what does it mean to be an architect that I find…
I have an idea that keeps haunting me now and then. To take a break from my current role (a leader of 60+ engineering unit) & go for a temporal (1 month?) contract assignment as an individual contributor - front-line software engineer. What has inspired such an idea? No, it's not about any kind of burn-out. Or because I'm fed up with my current work environment/role - quite the opposite. Have you heard about the idea of management by walking around (MBWA)? It has originated in Toyota's Kaizen culture - when Taiichi Ono has found out that to bring…
I'm not really a Scrum aficionado. Actually I'm pretty far from calling myself that way ;) But I can still remember the moment years ago when I was reading through Scrum Guide & some accompanying materials and I've found out a term that has really caught my attention: "the quality built-in"It may look inconspicuous, but in fact it's a very powerful concept. It can be described with the following statements: once the product has a desired level of quality, the effort to keep it there (at that level) is very low but continuousonce the product's quality has decreased, getting it…
99% of articles on this blog are in English, but this one is explicitly aimed at local, Polish community, so to lower the entry threshold for readers, I've decided to make an exception and use Polish. Sorry for inconvenience. To nie ja wymyśliłem Elixira w Shedulu. Stało sie to rok przed moim przyjściem do firmy, czyli ok. 2.5 roku temu i ojcem pomysłu był Karol - ówczesny CTO, a obecnie Architekt w firmie. Pomysł był zdecydowanie z kategorii tych odważnych - technologia młoda, mało kto o niej słyszał, nie stoi za nią żaden prężny koncern, praktycznie nie ma jej…
It's hard to find a company bigger than 30 people that doesn't have its HR Department - even if it consists of just 1 person. And the name itself is of secondary meaning: some call it Human Resources, some prefer People Operations, Human Capital, etc. Regardless of name I think that the bigger the company, the less existence of such a Dept makes sense. Why so?The work usually associated to such units is of a wide variety: Performance Mgmt, Talent Mgmt, Recruitment, Compensation & Benefits, Employee Relations, Growth and Organization Development, Employer Branding, .... But nearly all of those areas…
The first post in the series can be found here. Last week I've presented one aspect of complexity of the transactional part of our platform - availability (when trying to book a new appointment). And what is more important, how one modelling trick has significantly reduced coupling & simplified (and distributed) business logic. Today I'll cover another aspect of the same functionality (appointments) - pricing. And again, my goal is to show you how one Eureka moment has corrected the course of our architectural direction for the whole platform (!). Baby stepsInitially our pricing logic was trivial - each service type…
Few months ago I've published a short article about what is a Model Debt & why it matters. Today I'd like to provide you with two nice, crispy examples that illustrate the idea. Both are coming from the Domain I currently work on with my teams - booking appointments in Beauty & Wellness industry. Booking an appointment initially was very straightforward. Apart from knowing what (particular service) you were booking & whom (which stylist) you were booking, the only challenge was to make sure that no-one has booked the same time-slot (of a given stylist). We've achieved it in the…
Imagine that ...... you're at the doctor's because you don't feel well - there's something wrong with your health and you need professional help of a medical expert. You sit in front of him, but before you have any chance to describe your problems the interlocutor opens with lengthy praise of value and importance of ... enema. He claims to be a declared fan, who dry-practices enema in his free time, spends time on exploring new applications of enema out of its "core usage". He calls himself an enema artificer (it's even on his business card). Finally, he asks when was the…