Story of my life:
I have to confess I had no idea what a technical leader really does. I figured it out, eventually.
Seriously, this resonates a lot with what I find myself doing at Clearleft these days.
I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.
A series of posts on the decisions and trade-offs involved in being a tech lead:
I think good tech leads spend a lot of their time somewhere in between the two extremes, adjusting the balance as circumstances demand.
Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in your knowledge only become clear when you try explaining things to others. It’s OK if no one reads what you write. You get a lot out of just doing it for you.
Lots of good advice from Addy:
Saying no is better than overcommitting.
It’s like CSS exists in some bizarre quantum state; somehow both too complex to use, yet too simple to take seriously, all at once.
In many ways, CSS has greater impact than any other language on a user’s experience, which often directly influences success. Why, then, is its role so belittled?
Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room.
Dave laments the increasing number of complex jobs involved in front-end (or “full-stack”) development.
But whereas I would just leave at that, Dave does something constructive and points to a potential solution—a corresponding increase of more thinsliced full-time roles like design engineering, front-end ops, and CSS engineering.
We’re hiring a design engineer. You should apply.
It’s snappier than front-of-the-front-end developer.
Clearleft is hiring a head of front-end development. Could it be you?