I have been an engineer in the valley for more than 10 years. In this time, I have reported to quite a few managers, both good and bad. When I transitioned to an engineering manager role, I assumed that my engineering and mentoring experience would help me. In reality, I have found this assumption to be a far cry from the truth. In this story, I shed some light on the differences and what I am doing to close the gap.

Summary When data is stored on disk based storage devices, it is stored as blocks of data. These blocks are accessed in their entirety, making them the atomic disk access operation. Disk blocks are structured in much the same way as linked lists. Both contain a section for data, a pointer to the location of the next node(or block), and both need not be stored contiguously. Due to the fact that a number of records can only be sorted on one field, we can state that searching on a field that isn’t sorted requires a Linear Search which requires N/2 block accesses(on average), where N is the number of blocks that the table spans.

We are transitioning from a client-server world to a more-client, less-server world where there is a ton of stuff that happens on the client side. There are awesome libraries being developed for client side development and the God language of front end development is the base for all these libraries. In order to be a well rounded developer, I went back to the drawing board to learn javascript from scratch. And Professional Javascript for Web Developers by Nicholas Zakas is what I follow and highly recommend.

A manager readme is an operating manual on your management style and philosophy. There has been a lot written about the usefulness of such a document. There are three reasons why I am publishing mine. It helps me reflect on who I am and who I want to be as a person and a leader. There are a ton of ideas floating in my head around management and leadership best practices.

These are some notes and thoughts from a workshop I attended a few days ago at work. The workshop was loosely based on the ideas from Liz Wiseman’s book on multipliers. Who is a multiplier? Multipliers make people around them smarter. My intelligence and potential go up when I report to or am around multipliers. Who is a diminisher? A diminisher is the polar opposite of a multiplier. People who are otherwise exceptional perform poorly under diminishers.