Work
This week I handed over my tech lead responsibilities to another developer on the team, and it was pretty nice being able to remove a lot of meetings from my calendar.
To facilitate knowledge-sharing, I’m trying to pair by default on tasks I pick up, so I also spent a lot of time in hangouts (or the Slack equivalent, huddles). Voice calls are much less tiring than video calls.
I’ve only got two and a half weeks left at GDS now, I’ll have to figure out how to spend my month off before I waste it all.
Books
This week I read:
Staff Engineer by Will Larson
This was a good book which I intend to revisit in the near future (when I have access to the career ladder documentation for my new job). It covers what, broadly, a staff engineer is (including some of the archetypes that staff engineers tend to fall into), what you can do to help yourself become a staff engineer, and some guidance for how to do well in the role. But about half of the book is short interviews with staff engineers at a variety of different companies, talking about what they do and how they got there.
Even better, the book has hundreds of references—to articles, talks, people, and other books—which I’ll definitely go through to find more reading.
Miscellaneous
I got a new phone this week, it’s a Google Pixel 6. It doesn’t have an expanding battery pushing off the screen, and it runs the Starling app without lagging, so it’s already an improvement on my old phone.
Unfortunately, the nearest electronics recycling place looks to be miles away, so properly disposing of the old one will be a bit of an ordeal.